Looks Like A Hoax, Folks

There’s a purported picture and screen shot of a prototype XP3000.

I’m afraid it’s a fake, folks, for the following reasons.

1) Compare the picture of the CPU to one of a TBird. The layout of the two chips is identical.

2) An XP3000 chip will have to be a .13 micron CPU. Any .13 micron CPU core is going to considerably smaller than a .18 micron CPU core, not exactly the same size as a TBird core.

3) Even presuming AMD would use code names on the CPUs, the one thing they would not call it is a Palomino. A “CPU” of this speed would either be a Thoroughbred or a Barton.

4) This “chip” boasts a 20X multiplier. You need to have five FID pins to get that. This “CPU” only has four at the L1 bridge.

5) The PR scaling on the CPU is almost certainly incorrect. An XP2000+ runs at 1666MHz. If the current XP scaling holds up, an XP3000+ would be 2333MHz, not 2666MHz.

What it looks like was done here was simply to add 1000 to both the PR and the actual frequency (which incidentally would greatly ease picture doctoring). Whatever the PR rating of a 2666MHz actually ends up being, it almost certainly will not be a 1:1 ratio with actual MHz.

6) I won’t swear on this one, but if you greatly magnify a picture of the screen shot, some of the numbers look slightly out of place.

There are other nitpicking points, but I don’t want to beat this dead horse. 🙂

Sorry, but I don’t believe it, and you shouldn’t either.

Email Ed