AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1 GHz / 800 MHz

Aluminum vs. Copper

One of the biggest revelations that was made about the Thunderbird before its official launch was that it would employ the use of Copper interconnects rather than the more conventional Aluminum.  It later became evident that only some of the products carrying the Athlon name would feature Copper interconnects while others would continue to use Aluminum.

The reason for the move to Copper is because it conducts electricity better than Aluminum. Unfortunately, you cannot manufacture both Aluminum and Copper-based processors in a single plant, so AMD's Fab25 plant in Austin, TX, which has been manufacturing Aluminum based processors, cannot produce Copper Thunderbirds.  Luckily, AMD's Fab30 plant in Dresden, Germany is capable of producing Copper-based processors. Since the Thunderbird does not require that it be produced on a Copper process, both Austin and Dresden will be producing Thunderbird CPUs. 

There shouldn't be any performance differences between Copper and Aluminum-based Thunderbirds, so there's no reason to worry about getting a part from Dresden versus getting one from Austin.  Since both the Copper and Aluminum parts will operate at the same core voltage, their thermal characteristics should be similar as well.  So what then is the point for moving to Copper interconnects?

As AMD moves to finer manufacturing processes, in the future, the Copper interconnects will definitely play an important role as AMD approaches higher clock speeds. 

Whether you get a Dresden made copper-Thunderbird or an Austin-made aluminum part is pretty much up to the luck of the draw.  For example, our 1GHz Thunderbird part came from Dresden (Copper) while our 800MHz part came from Austin (Aluminum). 

AMD did mention to us that only the high performance parts would be manufactured out of Dresden for now, meaning that the upcoming Duron will be manufactured entirely out of Austin.  The reasoning behind this is that AMD's goal with the Duron is to crank out as many as possible and the easiest way to do that is to produce them on a process that is tried and true.  In addition, there's no reason to use copper interconnects on a processor that isn't scheduled to really hit high clock speeds anytime soon.