AMD Announces 65-nm Chips, Touts Power Savings

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.

Of Course..

[sylvainsf]

Intel will be holding still for 18 months while AMD catches up.

not to mention...

[TheSHAD0W]

That if you actually use it as a laptop, you won't have a problem with it burning your, er, "parts" [theregister.co.uk].

Re:Idles at 3.8W?

[Bilestoad]

Why, because you think Intel are going to stand still while AMD move to 65nm? By the time AMD actually ship 65nm, Intel will be shipping 45nm. And I call bullshit on AMD's power claims, at least until independent reviews have verified them. Intel's new core specifically designed for power efficiency and manufactured with a 65nm process uses more power than a 90nm has-been from AMD? Excuse me for feeling skeptical.

Re:Cooler is better.

[MSFanBoi2]

I went from over 500 Opeterons to just over 400 Xeon 5100's and got:

Better peformance

Better power utilization

Better BTU consumption

And last but not least... saved some cash...

Re:Nice chip but... will we get to see the benefit

[Retardican]

It doesn't matter, eventually linux will be the same.

I have a 500MHz Pentium III laptop I use, which was fine with Windows 2000. After they EOL'ed it, I switched to Linux. I am currently running Xubuntu (Ubuntu with Xfce), but as even Firefox and Thunderbird are getting bloated, it's sluggish. I even maxed out the ram (576MB), which helped a little, but I'm going to have to replace it soon.

Any suggestions on laptops with decent linux driver support that wouldn't crap out after 3 years? I'm spoiled by these old Thinkpads.

Ok look, you can have it one of two ways

[Sycraft-fu]

Features or efficiency. That's just how it goes. If you want software that does more nifty shit, you have to be willing to throw more horsepower at it. Lynx uses less memory, disk, etc than Firefox, however you certainly aren't going to see me switching. It's not like there is some magic programmers could use but don't to write fast, feature rich software.

Now maybe you long for the days of spartan computing, maybe you want to do nothing but scroll text really fast. That's fine, there's stuff out there to accommodate you. However that's not what most of us want. I want a feature rich system, I want my computer to be everything, do everything. Well for that I need hardware, and I'm willing to pay for it.

It would be like trying to compare frame rates between Ultima 1 and ES4: Oblivion. When you get down to it, Ultima 1 probably has a frame rate as fast or faster than Oblivion. Ultima 1 wouldn't have any trouble running at 30fps or more, even on 286 hardware. Oblivion can run under 30fps, even on an 8800GTX. However you are dealing with a totally different level of graphics. Ultima 1 was made to run in CGA which is 2D, 2-bit (4 colour), 320x200. Oblivion is full 3D with amazingly high geometry, 128-bit FP colour, 2560x1600 with anti-aliasing. Despite the speed being around the same, there is a difference.

While games are teh most pronounced difference, it's still there with other apps. Comparing Office to an old text mode Wordperfect app is meaningless. Ok, maybe for what you do you don't notice any difference, but many of us do. As a simple example, take a highly accurate, learning, in-line spell checker. I love that feature. Well, guess what? That takes resources. You couldn't do that on a really old computer, it just lacks the resources.

So if you are happy with what you have now, great, stick with it, but don't get mad that people want to find ways to use the new power. I do not buy a new graphics card to get higher and higher frame rates, 60fps is enough thanks that's all my screen does. I buy it for more an more features, at the same framerate. Likewise with processing in my computer. Everything is plenty fast now, my computer responds near instantaneously for normal tasks. So what I want is for my computer to do more. I want it capable of doing more complex things. In 1996 my computer played little postage-stamp sized videos, and used nearly 100% CPU to do it. Now it plays fullscreen HD videos and uses nearly 100% CPU (well ok, of one of the cores) to do it. I'm not pissed that it hasn't changed, I'm pleased with the increase in quality, the increase in features.

Re:That's all fine and dandy....

[Simon80]

That's funny, cause 2 years ago I got a 2.2Ghz A64 3400+ in a 15.4in lappy, and it gets over 2 hours of battery life. Then again, it underclocks to 800MHz when unplugged because the manufacturer said so.

Re:Depends on the Architecture

[segedunum]

Once Intel puts the memory controller on-die like AMD has, it's going to *really* hurt AMD.

Like I said. AMD has a better architecture.

Perhaps once we all have 8+ core chips on our desktops, you might see some HT advantages, but I believe I read somewhere that Intel has plans for on-die memory controllers and an answer to HT

Like I said. Better architecture. HT works much better as memory sizes grow, and guess which way memory sizes are going?