First could anyone confirm this please, and are those the fastest processor available for slotA?
Probably.
But the question is:
Does your motherboard, or rather chipset, support Slot A Thunderbirds?
The VIA KX133 chipset does not support the Thunderbird CPU.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20000605/t-bird-06.htmlDo you know if there was a version of the Thunderbird for slotA with 512k cache?
There is no Thunderbird with 512 kbytes of L2 cache. The original Athlon had 512 kbytes of "off die" L2 cache, i.e. L2 cache on seperate chips. The L2 cache ran, IIRC, at either 50%, 40% or 33% of the CPU core speed. The 500 MHz Athlon had 250 MHz L2 cache while the 1 GHz Athlon had 333 MHz L2 cache.
The Thunderbird has 256 kbytes of "on die" L2 cache. It operates at the same speed as the CPU core, i.e. a 1 GHz Thunderbird has 1 GHz L2 cache. So the cache is smaller but it is also a lot faster and has lower latency than the old "off die" cache.
Barton is the first Athlon with 512 kbytes of "on die" L2 cache.
Not taking the cache into account wich is faster?
You have to take the cache into account since it is a really important part of the CPU.
Anyway.. Thunderbird is faster.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20000605/t-bird-07.html
