AMD fabs first copper parts, 1GHz Athlon by year end?

AMD's new Dresden Fab 30 is not only complete, as we mentioned yesterday, but has run off its first CPUs with copper interconnects. German publication c't reports (in German) plant managing director Hans Deppe as saying that working copper K6 chips have already been produced. Deppe declined to say what the yield was, but was happy with the first production runs. Dresden staff are confident that the process will be capable of producing 1GHz speed Athlons by year end. This is a slight escalation of previous AMD clock speed sightings. We've, variously, had 750MHz for Q3 or Q4, and 1GHz for early next year. Depending on how Dresden's yields pan out, however, that could be moving to very early next year. ®