There's a little more bad news concerning the Athlon 750….

In order to so aggressively ramp the production of the new chip up to speed as quickly and cost effectively as possible, AMD is using 300MHz L2 off-die cache with the 750, which is 40% of the speed of the processor's core.

The other Athlon processors (500, 550, 600, 650, and 700) utilize off-die L2 cache that runs at 50% of the native speed of the CPU's core, and we can only surmise that the decision to slightly hamper the 750's performance by using slower cache comes from these desires:

1. Lower cost to AMD, and a lower cost to AMD's customers.

We've disclosed previously that AMD-customer Compaq is the likely driving force behind the early introduction of the Athlon 750 this year rather than when it was intended by AMD to be introduced, which was mid to late January 2000.

Therefore it's not out of line to suggest that, in order to make the Athlon 750 more price competitive than the rival Intel P3-733 CPU for Compaq and consumers alike, AMD specified the less expensive 300MHz L2 cache SRAM chips for the 750 rather than the more expensive 375MHz L2 SRAM chips it should utilize.