AMD Announces 65-nm Chips, Touts Power Savings 234
Several readers wrote in about AMD's entry into the 65-nm manufacturing generation. The company introduced four chips to be manufactured with 65-nm process in the first quarter of 2007 to replace existing 90-nm chips in their lineup. AMD is playing up the power economy of its line, claiming that even its existing 90-nm parts consume less than 50% the power of Intel's Core 2 Duo, averaged over a typical day's usage, while the new 65-nm chips will be even stingier with power. Next stop, 45-nm. The article says that AMD has a goal of catching up within 18 months to Intel's lead on the way to 45-nm technology.
Cooler is better. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Idles at 3.8W? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Technology, progress. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:18 months is, like, a generation (Score:4, Informative)
65nm was a particularly bad node for AMD in terms of Intel's lead. Their plan for 45nm seems to be shaping up better with Fab 36, so I expect them to be closer though probably not caught up.
Re:Idles at 3.8W? (Score:3, Informative)
i can't wait till the hardware sites test a laptop version....
Re:Idles at 3.8W? (Score:4, Informative)
I agree, take things with a grain of salt until we see reviews. But you sound a little too skeptical of AMD to not be working for Intel.
Re:18 months is, like, a generation (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, since Intel will also be moving forward over the next 18 months, they might end up still in the lead. Making a huge turnaround like they did (from Netburst to Core) in such a short time is remarkable. Creating an architecture and setting up the process and designing a generation of chips takes a looooong time. Kudos to Intel for that. Now the ball is in AMD's court, and they have to respond.
At the high end, of course, Intel rules. What about processors that normal people buy?
I was recently looking at a Core2Duo review, and noticed something interesting. At each brand's bottom end (E6300 vs. X2 3800), Intel outperformed AMD. The problem in my mind, however, is that Intel's bottom-end starts at a higher price point than AMD's. Very smart marketing move by Intel. However, If you match the processors price-to-price, the E6300 matches up against the X2 4200 (both currently around $180), and there is relatively little performance difference. In other words, the price/performance metric really isn't in anyone's favor.
Another smart (but a little slimy) marketing move Intel has made is in the power dissipation numbers. AMD quotes their CPU's maximum dissipation, and Intel quotes a power figure for some arbitrary (under 100%) CPU load. Intel looks good here....until you actually measure a system's power draw at the outlet, and find that again, there's not that much difference. This may (and probably will) drastically change as AMD's 65nm parts get out, but we'll have to wait and see.
Re:Errr... (Score:3, Informative)
A 65nm 65W X2 idles with lower power consumption than a 90nm 35W X2. At full CPU load the 35W X2 would still have the edge. Since your average desktop PC spends most of its time idling this is not insignificant.
Re:Idles at 3.8W? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Idles at 3.8W? (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/25/green_mach
Re:Depends on the Architecture (Score:4, Informative)
That's actually not true... As Intel introduced new CPUs going into the 775 socket, they started using more and more of the pins that were originally "reserved" -- so, in order to support a new CPU, certain additional pins would have to be tied high, low, to calibration resistors, etc. What that means is that while *older* 775 CPUs will run fine on new motherboards, the new 775 CPUs will not run on old motherboards, even with a BIOS flash.
For example, my 775 board running a P4 3GHz will only take P4s up to 3.4GHz or so, since the faster ones were new 65nm cores with slight pin changes. Pentium D, and newer Cores are also in the excluded category..
Re:That's all fine and dandy.... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Idles at 3.8W? (Score:4, Informative)
1) That would take into account the efficiency of the transformer, which doesn't impact battery life.
2) Many laptops run in a high power/performance mode when plugged in.
3) At least be sure to take the battery out of the laptop so it's not charging while you're measuring!
Re:Depends on the Architecture (Score:3, Informative)
Back when Itanium was sporting both impressive SpecFP scores and also gigantic caches, I wondered what would happen if you put a cache that size on a mainstream x86 part -- specfp is really more about cache size and memory bandwidth than it is about the floating point execution units, so I never bought the specfp rating as being due to an inherent advantage of itanium. Well, now we know.
While not very exciting architecturally, big caches are certainly a good way to boost performance. Intel gets those huge caches because of two things: First, they have the fab tech and fab capacity to produce gigantic chips with good yield and still make money. Second, Intel has the smallest cache cell size in the industry. So they are uniquely positioned to put big caches on mainstream parts, and they are taking advantage of it.
Intel, with the C2D, introduced a more aggressive out-of-order memory architecture, basically allowing any memory op, even with an unresolved address, to execute out of order, fixing it up later if there was a problem.
Slight correction on a very fine post: Memory ops that have their address are allowed to go out-of-order even if there are older ops which do not have their address (meaning in the case of an out of order load and a store without its address a possible forwarding case that will have to be fixed once the store gets its address). It doesn't make any sense to have a memory op go without its address, because you couldn't really do anything with it (without something like an address predictor).