page_title: Athlon
section_title: Athlon Thunderbird (2000-2001)
hierarchical_section_title: Athlon / Generations / Athlon Thunderbird (2000-2001)
caption_attribution_description: English: Inside of AMD Slot A Athlon Thunderbird 900 MHz. Part number AMD-A0900MMR24B A.
context_page_description: Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of x86-compatible microprocessors designed and manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices. The original Athlon was the first seventh-generation x86 processor and was the first desktop processor to reach speeds of one gigahertz. It made its debut as AMD’s high-end processor brand on June 23, 1999. Over the years AMD has used the Athlon name with the 64-bit Athlon 64 architecture, the Athlon II, and Accelerated Processing Unit chips targeting the Socket AM1 desktop SoC architecture, and Socket AM4 Zen microarchitecture. The modern Zen-based Athlon with a Radeon Graphics processor was introduced in 2019 as AMD’s highest-performance entry-level processor.
  Athlon comes from the Ancient Greek ἆθλον meaning " contest", or "prize of a contest", or "place of a contest; arena". With the Athlon name originally used for AMD's mid-range processors with combined CPU/GPU processors with the GPU disabled, AMD currently uses Athlon for budget APUs with integrated graphics. AMD positions the Athlon against its rival, the Intel Pentium.
context_section_description: The second generation Athlon, the Thunderbird or T-Bird, debuted on June 4, 2000. This version of the Athlon had a traditional pin-grid array (PGA) format that plugged into a socket ("Socket A") on the motherboard or the slot A package. The major difference between it and the Athlon Classic was cache design, with AMD adding in 256 KB of on-chip, full-speed exclusive cache. In moving to an exclusive cache design, the L1 cache's contents were not duplicated in the L2, increasing total cache size and functionally creating a large L1 cache with a slower region (the L2) and a fast region (the L1), making the L2 cache into basically a victim cache. With the new cache design, need for high L2 performance and size was lessened, and the simpler L2 cache was less likely to cause clock scaling and yield issues. Thunderbird also moved to a 16-way associative layout.
  The Thunderbird was "cherished by many for its overclockability," and proved commercially successful, as AMD's most successful product since the Am386DX-40 ten years earlier. AMD's new fab facility in Dresden increased production for AMD overall and put out Thunderbirds at a fast rate, with the process technology improved by a switch to copper interconnects. After several versions were released in 2000 and 2001 of the Thunderbird, the last Athlon processor using the Thunderbird core was released in 2001 in the summer, at which point speeds were at 1.4 Ghz.
  Specifications
  L1-cache: 64 + 64 KB (data + instructions)
  L2-cache: 256 KB, full speed
  MMX, 3DNow!
  Slot A & Socket A (EV6)
  Front-side bus: 100 MHz (Slot-A, B-models), 133 MHz (C-models) (200 MT/s, 266 MT/s)
  VCore: 1.70–1.75 V
  First release: June 5, 2000
  Transistor count: 37 million
  Manufacturing Process: 0.18 μm/180 nm
  Clockrate:
  Slot A: 650–1000 MHz
  Socket A, 100 MHz FSB (B-models): 600–1400 MHz
  Socket A, 133 MHz FSB (C-models): 1000–1400 MHz
caption: Open Athlon Thunderbird slot A cartridge
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