Next Athlon Platau 1.7-1.8GHz?

[Pederv]

While I was looking at Tom's 1GHz Duron Review I noticed something about the Athlons he used in the comparison. The performance increased pretty much linearly up until the 1.3-1.4GHz CPU's. Now if the 200MHz FSB chips start to platau at 1.3GHz and the same effect happens to the 266MHz FSB chips at the same multiplier, then we should start to see the platau at 1.7GHz. Now the Athlon4 and it's little extras may help to push this effect up a little more, but how far - 1.8 - 1.9 - 2GHz? With AMD saying it'll be at 1.7GHz by the end of the year, they are going to need to either put 512K L2 on the CPU's or up the FSB to 333MHz before they release the 1.8GHz. But from what I hear, the earliest we'll see this is the next generation (Thoroughbred?, Barton?). As to the effects I'm talking about, those who push their systems to the edge will notice the point of deminishing returns before anybody else.

 

[MCS]

FSB has been the way to go since we got past about 1.2Ghz

Those of us running at 300Mhz DDR bus or higher have noticed this. We are just waiting for the 1/5 and 1/6 PCI divider and some PC-200 memory