The biggest rumor that has been floating around, unconfirmed, was that AMD was going to be lengthening the pipeline of the Athlon core in order to allow for higher clock speeds. While we mentioned that this is one method to paving the way for higher clock speeds in our Pentium 4 review, this isn’t by any means the only way to achieve a higher clock speed. Needless to say, AMD won’t be making any changes to the Athlon’s pipeline for the Palomino core (ecc ecc...)
If the Palomino core, still based on AMD’s 0.18-micron process, is going to offer one advantage over the Thunderbird, its lower power consumption, how much lower are we talking? According to the representatives we talked to, they were expecting at least a 20% reduction in power consumption and heat production (e qui si menziona la riduzione del consumo)