AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1 GHz / 800 MHz

Part Numbers & Buying a Thunderbird

Earlier on in the review, we mentioned that the Thunderbird would still fall underneath the Athlon name, basically meaning that now there are two types of Athlons that carry the same name.  The Athlon 750 – 1GHz parts will be available in both regular Athlon and Thunderbird versions, so how can you tell the two apart?

First of all, don't assume that the difference will be price.  AMD is hoping to make the transition to Thunderbird as quickly as possible, and what they're doing to help ensure that is by selling Thunderbird parts to vendors at the exact same price as older Athlon parts.  Meaning that it costs as much for a vendor to purchase an older Athlon 800 as it does for them to purchase a new Thunderbird-based Athlon 800.  This should translate into Thunderbirds being the exact same price as the regular Athlons, although some vendors may discount the older Athlons by a bit in order to rid themselves of any excess stock they may have.

The easiest way to tell the two CPUs apart is that the Thunderbirds will be advertised as a Socket-A processor, whereas the regular Athlons will simply be Slot-A parts.  If you ask for a Socket-A Athlon, you're definitely going to get a Thunderbird (unless your vendor sells you a Duron which is also Socket-A, but that's a sign of a bad vendor). 

Another way to make certain that you'll be getting a Thunderbird is to make sure to select an Athlon with 256KB of on-die L2 cache, as the regular Athlon is only available with 512KB of L2 cache. 

If all of that fails (which it shouldn't), you can always look at the part numbers on the chips themselves.  Here is a quick tutorial on what the part numbers mean.

The part number for the older Athlons followed this type of a scheme: AMD-K7XXX where XXX is the clock frequency.  In the case of an Athlon 900, the part number would be AMD-K7900.

The part numbers for the newer Thunderbirds follow this type of a scheme: AMD-AXXXX where XXX is the clock frequency.  In the case of a 900MHz Thunderbird, the part number would be AMD-A0900.