T-bird? Athlon? I'm really confused

[Dee67]

Just got this system today, it's 1.2 ghz amd SiSoft Sandra says thunderbird in some spots, athlon in others?

What's the difference between these two and how can I know which/what I have?

 

[trueimage]

its a tbird, classic athlons are only made in slot a, not socket a and up to 1 ghz only

 

[Renob]

You can get t-birds in the slot-a

 

[Muerto]

The Thunderbird is just the newest type of Athlon. The original ones were known as the K7 (0.25 micron) and the K75 (0.18 micron). They were both in slot-A form and had the L2 cache on the processor card.

The Thunderbird is a socketed chip and has the L2 cache integrated on the die, and therefore it's faster (it's also 0.18 micron). But other than that it's more or less the same thing.

 

[ChipNOW]

Thunderbird is the designation of the "new" AMD Athlon processor, which utilises the Socket A interface, rather than Slot A, and has 256kb of on-die L2 cache as compared to the 512kb of the Slot version.
The reason is Thunderbird is an unofficial designation, AMD prefer to call it the AMD Athlon processor with performance enhancing cache. Phew!