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.

Comments

Re:Idles at 3.8W?

[joshetc]

Extremely nice. Most people dont account for the integrated memory controller reducing the power consumption of the northbridge either. As a whole Turion notebooks should be extremely power stingy.

Re:18 months is, like, a generation

[Chris Burke]

Not really screwed, especially if they fail to catch up but do narrow the gap. AMD has always been behind Intel in terms of process technology. AMD has gotten ahead on some specific process tech, like copper interconnect and SOI, but in terms of overall process shrinkage and quality of process, Intel has always been ahead. AMD has been more behind in the past, but also a lot closer, sometimes only months behind Intel. Basically, they are familiar with this situation.

65nm was a particularly bad node for AMD in terms of Intel's lead. Their plan for 45nm seems to be shaping up better with Fab 36, so I expect them to be closer though probably not caught up.

Re:Idles at 3.8W?

[80 85 83 83 89 33]

the best part from the article:

AMD's argument goes like this: modern desktop and notebook processors constantly scale up and down between full speed and an idle state, which AMD has branded "Cool 'n' Quiet". At a given time, pushed to full load by an application, AMD's chips run hotter and consume more power. But across a typical computing day - where a user might check his email or surf the Web - the processor idles more often then not. At idle, AMD's 90-nm Athlon 64 X2 consumes 7.5 watts. Its latest 65-nm chips idle at 3.8 watts. By comparison, the 65-nm Core 2 Duo idles at 14.3 watts.

[...]However, directly comparing the two chips' power load, in a real-world computing environment, over the course of a day, would be a daunting task, Huynh acknowledged.

i can't wait till the hardware sites test a laptop version....

Re:Idles at 3.8W?

[Firehed]

So Intel is shipping 45nm? According to Bit-tech, these 65nm AMD chips are shipping today.

I agree, take things with a grain of salt until we see reviews. But you sound a little too skeptical of AMD to not be working for Intel.

Re:18 months is, like, a generation

[LehiNephi]

AMD has consistently been a step behind Intel in the die-shrinking competition. The fact that AMD's chips run as cool as or cooler than their equal-performing Intel counterparts even at the larger process is a credit to good engineering.

Of course, since Intel will also be moving forward over the next 18 months, they might end up still in the lead. Making a huge turnaround like they did (from Netburst to Core) in such a short time is remarkable. Creating an architecture and setting up the process and designing a generation of chips takes a looooong time. Kudos to Intel for that. Now the ball is in AMD's court, and they have to respond.

At the high end, of course, Intel rules. What about processors that normal people buy?

I was recently looking at a Core2Duo review, and noticed something interesting. At each brand's bottom end (E6300 vs. X2 3800), Intel outperformed AMD. The problem in my mind, however, is that Intel's bottom-end starts at a higher price point than AMD's. Very smart marketing move by Intel. However, If you match the processors price-to-price, the E6300 matches up against the X2 4200 (both currently around $180), and there is relatively little performance difference. In other words, the price/performance metric really isn't in anyone's favor.

Another smart (but a little slimy) marketing move Intel has made is in the power dissipation numbers. AMD quotes their CPU's maximum dissipation, and Intel quotes a power figure for some arbitrary (under 100%) CPU load. Intel looks good here....until you actually measure a system's power draw at the outlet, and find that again, there's not that much difference. This may (and probably will) drastically change as AMD's 65nm parts get out, but we'll have to wait and see.

Re:Depends on the Architecture

[Pulzar]

Many of the already existing S775 boards for Intel will upgrade the CPU to Core2 (perhaps with a BIOS flash).

That's actually not true... As Intel introduced new CPUs going into the 775 socket, they started using more and more of the pins that were originally "reserved" -- so, in order to support a new CPU, certain additional pins would have to be tied high, low, to calibration resistors, etc. What that means is that while *older* 775 CPUs will run fine on new motherboards, the new 775 CPUs will not run on old motherboards, even with a BIOS flash.

For example, my 775 board running a P4 3GHz will only take P4s up to 3.4GHz or so, since the faster ones were new 65nm cores with slight pin changes. Pentium D, and newer Cores are also in the excluded category..

Re:Idles at 3.8W?

[timeOday]

No, most people doing serious testing actually measure wall plug power, which takes into account everything in the case.

I wouldn't measure power consumption on a laptop that way, for a few reasons:

1) That would take into account the efficiency of the transformer, which doesn't impact battery life.
2) Many laptops run in a high power/performance mode when plugged in.
3) At least be sure to take the battery out of the laptop so it's not charging while you're measuring!