Not much time is left till the launching of AMD Athlon Ultra based on the Mustang core, so as is expected rumors about it have started circulating. Mustang core is planned to be launched in the beginning of next year. The upcoming processor will feature Athlon architecture with an extra large integrated L2 cache and will be aimed at workstations and servers. Moreover, Mustang is said to be supporting multiprocessor configurations (with 760DP chipset based mainboards).
So what info has been leaked so far? Mainly the expected features of the new processors:
Socket A form factor
27+ million transistors
Improved FPU and ALU
Alpha EV6 266MHz Architecture Bus support
Debut at 1.6GHz
Copper Interconnections
0.13 micron core
128KB full-speed L1
1.5MB full speed on-die L2
Extra pipelines added to the core
Advanced 3dNow! SIMD extensions, which include 20 + new optimizations
Power Now! Support (Corvette, mobile Mustang)
Power consumption will be low, 1.4V and around 23W
It looks good. The fact that the architecture will be slightly redesigned compared to the ordinary Athlon CPU, raises our hopes that the Mustang will manage to survive head on competition with Intel's Pentium 4.
The new processor is expected in early 2001.
