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AMD Announces 65-nm Chips, Touts Power Savings

Posted by kdawson on from the smaller-and-cooler dept.

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.

1 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Depends on the Architecture by segedunum · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Intel have stolen a march at the moment, basically because they had to, but because they've seen huge improvements by revamping their architecture and going to 65 nm. AMD have been behind in going down to 65 nm (it takes a lot of effort to get the processes in place), but I was always intrigued as to what would happen if they took their existing Athlon 64 architecture, improved it and ran it through a 65 nm process. I guess we'll find out, but I'd expect Core Duo's apparent lead to be pretty short lived. There's nothing inherently brilliant in their architecture, other than them stealing a march on AMD in terms of 65 nm and adding cores like there's no tomorrow, that suggests they're going to have a lead anything like AMD had with the Athlon and Opteron over the ill-fated Pentiums. Cores is the new gigahertz.

    AMD still leads Intel by a country mile on budget processors as well. I've heard a lot of price/performance arguments from the Intel camp, but it's just crap basically. The fact is that AMD still produces the most unbelievably cheap processors around, and they're not exactly miles behind the expensive stuff either. Processors like the Sempron have done an awful lot to give people budget, but fast systems.

    Quite frankly, on a level playing field I think we're going to find out that Intel's Cores are not quite as good as a lot of people have been raving. AMD's architectures are just a whole lot better.