AMD's 0.13-micron Thoroughbred - Cool but Slipping at 2200+

Not a good Overclocker

One of the reasons we usually get excited with the launch of a new core is to test its overclocking potential, unfortunately the Thoroughbred core doesn't succeed in impressing us. We had a sample of four Thoroughbred CPUs that are pictured below:

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The CPUs seen above include an Athlon XP 2200+, 1900+, 1800+ and 1700+; all of the CPUs used the new Thoroughbred core.

Unlocking these processors for overclocking was quite simple since the L1 bridges didn't have little pits dug into them as you can see from the following picture:

The L1 bridges just need a little bit of conductive ink to unlock this CPU

One of the best ways to see how much headroom a manufacturing process has is to see how far you can overclock a chip with normal cooling and at default core voltages, so we did just that on these four CPUs. The results are as follows:

It seems as if the Thoroughbred core needs some time to mature at this point, let's see how far we took the CPUs at voltages as high as 1.850V. Again, we stuck to stock cooling:

Once again, nothing stellar out of the cores although we did get a little more out of them.