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AMD Says Power Efficiency Still Key

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the teaser-trailers dept.

Larsonist writes to tell us that even though AMD's new architecture wont be released until mid-2007 they are still letting people in on what some of the new features will be. From the article: "While clock speeds have not been revealed, each of the four cores will integrate 64 KB L1 Cache and 512 KB L2 cache. The native quad-core architecture will also include a 2 MB shared L3 cache, which may increase in capacity over time. The processor will have a total of four Hypertransport links - up from three today - that provide a total bandwidth to outside devices of 5.2 GB/s. AMD is also thinking about integrating support for FB-DIMMs 'when appropriate.'"

4 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. But will it... by corychristison · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... run OS/2?

    Joking aside, lately I've been pondering AMD's next move in the everlasting Intel vs. AMD chess game.

    I'm here for hoping they can pull ahead again and force Intel to do the same.
    Always Remember: competition is good!

  2. Re:Almost obligatory statement... by dfinster · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Really interesting question. For my entire career (since 1983), hardware has outrun software, and OS software in particular. This is a new and interesting twist. Extracting money from users based on "number of processors" or "processor power factor" (think Oracle) may become more difficult in a world of muti-core, multi-die, and multiple architecture.

    For example, which is worth more (none of these CPUs exist) - a quad CORE 2 or a eight core Athlon XP?

    I'd expect the eight-way to be better at some tasks that are easy to multi-thread, perhaps database servers. I'd expect the quad CORE 2 to be better at most general tasks, mostly because current OS and compilers aren't designed for multiple cores.

  3. Biggest way for AMD to save power by Aaron+England · · Score: 4, Insightful

    is to reduce the distance between their transistors from 90nm to 65. Intel started shipping their 65nm chips nearly a year ago (OCT 2005), while AMD has yet to ship any. AMD isn't expected to be fully converted to the 65nm process until mid-2007, and by then Intel is expected to start shipping their 45nm chips. AMD is playing catch-up these days and it's hurting them bad.

  4. Power isn't the only criterion by BlueBiker · · Score: 3, Insightful
    So you'd rather run two cores at 1.7GHz and 1.2V instead of one core at 2.4GHz and 1.4V and one core at 1GHz and 1.4V.
    If you have a single thread going flat out, you'll be sacrificing performance if you throttle its core down to achieve voltage parity with a second mostly idle core. Instead of having idle cores drag the speeds down, maybe active cores should push the speeds up.