AMD's 2000 Roadmap - The Facts

The third derivative of the Athlon core will be the Mustang, which will be out sometime in Q3/Q4 2000. 

The Mustang core will offer some tweaks and enhancements over the Thunderbird core, including support for larger on-die L2 cache sizes (~1MB) as well as AMD's PowerNow! technology.  AMD has not disclosed any of the other feature enhancements as they are concentrating on the Thunderbird/Duron parts right now.  However, closer to the release date of the Mustang, you'll hear more about it. 

The Mustang will actually be quite a bit more than simply the server/workstation Athlon part; the high end market will simply be one area that the Mustang is geared towards. 

The Mustang will eventually find itself in every Athlon derived processor after its release, starting off as the core for the Athlon Ultra (High End server/workstation part), but by varying the amount of on-die L2 cache, the Mustang core will find its way in desktop Athlon parts as well as in mobile Athlon solutions. 

This means that the Thunderbird will be fairly short-lived if it is to be replaced by the Mustang as the core of choice for the Athlon later this year, and it also means that AMD is going to be able to compete with Intel much more seriously than they have in the past in the mobile market with the mobile Mustang.

The mobile Mustang, going under the code name Corvette, will feature a smaller L2 cache than the desktop Athlon (Mustang) part and a lower voltage, which makes sense since it will be a mobile part.