AMD Says Power Efficiency Still Key

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Saturday September 2, 2006 @11:05AM 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.'"

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Biggest way for AMD to save power by Aaron+England · 2006-09-02 12:09 · 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.