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 Advanced Micro Devices on Monday will beef up its desktop processor line with a new Athlon XP 3000+ processor.  
The chip, based on AMD's new "Barton" processor core, represents a potential bright spot for the company, after a year of difficulty brought on by the sluggish PC market and excess inventories in 2002. 
 
The Barton core gives the 3000+ a larger 512KB cache and support for AMD's 333MHz bus. The larger cache and faster bus--holding larger amounts of data close to the processor core and speeding up data to and from the chip--help increase the chip's model number by boosting performance. 
 
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