65nm Athlons Debut With Lower Power Consumption

TheRaindog writes "AMD has finally rolled out Athlon 64 X2 processors based on 65nm process technology, and The Tech Report has an interesting look at their energy usage and overclocking potential compared to current 90nm models. The new 65nm chips consume less power at idle and under load than their 90nm counterparts, and appear to have plenty of headroom for overclocking. An Athlon 64 X2 5000+ that normally runs at 2.4 GHz was taken all the way up to 2.9 GHz with standard air cooling and only a marginal voltage boost, suggesting that we may see faster chips from AMD soon."

Re:HTPC

[Mayhem178]

What, your HTPC can't render Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within on the fly? Lame. ;)

Okay, no, seriously. I have an Athlon X2 3800, and it runs deathly quiet for any operation I've thrown at it. Considering that the machine I have it in is my primary gaming PC, I'd say that's noteworthy. And I've never noticed any great amount of heat production, either.

Re:Interesting..

[gone9teen]

You do realize, well obviously you don't, the clock speed of a processor means nothing between different models when it comes to performance. A newer 2.0 Core 2 Due processor SMOKES my 3.0 Pentium 4.

Re:Interesting..

[joshetc]

Duh, all athlon 64 dual cores to date are clock for clock nearly identical though. This means clock speed does matter. I can't believe you got modded up for making such a shitty assumption on a "geek" website.

Lower heat (and performance, ....)

[IYagami]

...But most of the time irrelevant.

Anandtech has two good reviews here (lower power) [anandtech.com] and here (lower performance) [anandtech.com]

The main reason is the increase of L2 Cache Latency from 12 cycles to 20. But in most of the benchmarks the difference is very low.

Re:Interesting..

[Anonymous Coward]

meanwhile core 2 duo systems continue to best AMD's offerings.....

Re:HTPC

[Neon Spiral Injector]

It is just this specific codec, any ffmpeg based player in either Linux or Windows just dies on 1080i H.264. 720p H.264 is fine, as is 1080i MPEG2. I also have some 1080p WMVs that play fine.

Re:Take my advice....please

[Courageous]

This is if you want to run Windows guests. Linux guests are best run paravirtualized for performance reasons. But point well-taken.

C//

Re:Nice but a little slower. Surprise!

[MrFlibbs]

According to the AnandTech article you referenced, saying that "it looks good" is a bit of an overstatement. Here are a few quotes from the article:

          "It's clear that these first 65nm chips, while lower power than their 90nm
          counterparts, aren't very good even by AMD's standards."

          "Performance and efficiency are still both Intel's fortes thanks to its Core 2
          lineup, and honestly the only reason to consider Brisbane is if you currently
          have a Socket-AM2 motherboard."

In every single AnandTech benchmark, Intel wins in both raw performance and performance per watt. And if raw power consumption is important to you, the winner was a 90nm AMD SFF part. In no case was a 65nm AMD better at anything.

The article does point out that a mature 90nm process is being compared to an immature 65nm process and thus future steppings are bound to be better. However, this doesn't change the fact that the current crop of AMD 65nm parts are a major disappointment.

Re:Interesting..

[teg]

Duh, all athlon 64 dual cores to date are clock for clock nearly identical though. This means clock speed does matter.

They're almost identical - cache sizes vary, and, more importantly, the new ones (65 nm) have higher cache latency [anandtech.com]

.