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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.
I'm way ahead of the game, my transistors are -30nm. I had to do some funny things with space time, but they work. Until you observe them anyways. Next up, I'm going for inm chips.
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.
At 23 seconds I would call you lucky. With my Sony, the battery only lasted 16 seconds before it exploded! Now THAT is poor battery life.
Just stay away from (-30+i)nm chips. They're way too complex.
Is anyone as tired of software companies eating up the gain in hardware performance as me? And for what? How about someone writing better software, not just new software. I got sick of buying new hardware just to open the same document because the O/S or new Office suite was bloated/full of shit/required way more horsepower just to do the same task. No Vista for me. I'll stay will XP and Linux on my (older) machines. And if MS forces people to go Vista, I'll go Linux or BSD. If I get new hardware, it will be to make these systems faster, not make new software, doing the same job, run the same speed.
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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.
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I remember a test in the German C't magazine where complete computers were tested. Everything being equal except mainboard and CPU. The CPUs were AMD Athlon 64 vs. Intel Core2Duo
Under load, the Core2Duo machines used a bit less power. Idling, the AMDs were better. The overall differences were pretty small compared to the total power consumption, so I'd disregard them for a typical desktop that does NOT run 24/7.
And BTW, avoid the old Pentium 4/Pentium D. Those are really inferior.
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Features or efficiency. That's just how it goes. If you want software that does more nifty shit, you have to be willing to throw more horsepower at it. Lynx uses less memory, disk, etc than Firefox, however you certainly aren't going to see me switching. It's not like there is some magic programmers could use but don't to write fast, feature rich software.
Now maybe you long for the days of spartan computing, maybe you want to do nothing but scroll text really fast. That's fine, there's stuff out there to accommodate you. However that's not what most of us want. I want a feature rich system, I want my computer to be everything, do everything. Well for that I need hardware, and I'm willing to pay for it.
It would be like trying to compare frame rates between Ultima 1 and ES4: Oblivion. When you get down to it, Ultima 1 probably has a frame rate as fast or faster than Oblivion. Ultima 1 wouldn't have any trouble running at 30fps or more, even on 286 hardware. Oblivion can run under 30fps, even on an 8800GTX. However you are dealing with a totally different level of graphics. Ultima 1 was made to run in CGA which is 2D, 2-bit (4 colour), 320x200. Oblivion is full 3D with amazingly high geometry, 128-bit FP colour, 2560x1600 with anti-aliasing. Despite the speed being around the same, there is a difference.
While games are teh most pronounced difference, it's still there with other apps. Comparing Office to an old text mode Wordperfect app is meaningless. Ok, maybe for what you do you don't notice any difference, but many of us do. As a simple example, take a highly accurate, learning, in-line spell checker. I love that feature. Well, guess what? That takes resources. You couldn't do that on a really old computer, it just lacks the resources.
So if you are happy with what you have now, great, stick with it, but don't get mad that people want to find ways to use the new power. I do not buy a new graphics card to get higher and higher frame rates, 60fps is enough thanks that's all my screen does. I buy it for more an more features, at the same framerate. Likewise with processing in my computer. Everything is plenty fast now, my computer responds near instantaneously for normal tasks. So what I want is for my computer to do more. I want it capable of doing more complex things. In 1996 my computer played little postage-stamp sized videos, and used nearly 100% CPU to do it. Now it plays fullscreen HD videos and uses nearly 100% CPU (well ok, of one of the cores) to do it. I'm not pissed that it hasn't changed, I'm pleased with the increase in quality, the increase in features.
I'd rather see less dense microprocessors. The problem is this big chip manufactuerers make these super dense mammoth race car processors, it concentrates heat in one place, requiring a CPU fan, which is a mechanical component that can and will eventually fail.
I would rather have a motherboard with a CPU design distributed, where the surface area is spread out in such a way, that is completely solid state without any moving parts to fail, namely, a CPU does no require active cooling.
The future lies in completly 100% solid state devices. What does this philosophy mean?
No CPU fans, no power supply fans, no harddrives (flash memory instead), no noise, no moving parts whatsoever. Distributed or minimized waste heat.
Reliability and shock resistance skyrocket. You can seal them inside waterproof and dust proof and fire proof boxes.
I've implemented these kind of computers, at critical network points, and literally you can plug them in FOR YEARS and forget about them.
They are absolutely silent. And absolutely low powered. And totally reliable. All of which, is a very beautiful thing from an engineering standpoint.
These guys need to hire me on their team, because the definition of what is going to be expected in computers is going to radically change in the near future. Computers are going to go under, they are going to become *embedded* in everything with no expectaions of mainenance to them at all and installed in harsh environments. They either work or they fail after decades of use (or preferably, never), and then you replace them.
Reliability is CORE, and to achieve it, computers are going to have to abandon all cruches and become purely solid state devices entombed in indestructible plastic modules.
How often have you ever reformated the drive on your wrist watch? Had to reinstall an OS on your cellphone? Had to replace the CPU fan on your calculator?
I often wondered, why in heck weren't motherboards encased in protective plastic casing, and the same for ISA / PCI / AGP / PCI-x cards. Putting a comptuer together today has become like putting together lego blocks. And each component should be as equally durable and interchangable based on standards as a lego block.
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Luxury. My laptop would run out of power 45 minutes before I started it, explode, stab me to death with bread knives and then dance about on my grave singing Hallelujah. And that was if we were lucky!
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- Intel puts twice as much L2 cache on their dies as does AMD for their high-end parts. The high-end Intel part has 4MB, the high-end AMD part as 1MB per core for a total of 2M.
- Intel's L2 cache architecture is "shared", meaning that when you're running a single-thread benchmark, the single core on which the benchmark is running basically has access to the entire 4M L2. This is significant because it now means the single core running on an Intel part has 4M of L2, whereas on AMD it has 1M. This is quite a nice feature for Intel's single-thread performance.
- In 32-bit x86 mode, there are 8 general purpose registers (GPRs). That means spill/fill code (which certainly hits in L2 and almost certainly hits in L1) is a lot more common. In other words, memory ops are more common. Intel, with the C2D, introduced a more aggressive out-of-order memory architecture, basically allowing any memory op, even with an unresolved address, to execute out of order, fixing it up later if there was a problem. This really, really helps with memory ops, especially the common spill/fill ones going to the (cached) stack. In 64-bit AMD64/EM64T code, there are more GPRs for the compiler to play with, so you have less spill/fill code and fewer memory ops, which mitigates C2D's advantage here. That's one of my theories on why 64-bit performance of AMD vs. Intel chips is closer (the other, which isn't a theory, is Intel's lack of a 64-bit-capable IOMMU, causing the OS to use bounce buffers for DMA to high-addressed main memory).
What I'm basically saying here is, C2D's larger cache and more-aggressive load/store architecture are really helping it for certain apps. My guess is that the libtomcrypt benchmarks are run in 64-bit mode (mitigating Intel advantage point #3 above) and either a) fit entirely in the L1 or L2 of both processors, nullifying any cache advantage C2D has, or b) fit in *neither* of the L2 caches, and is significantly larger than 4MB, which lets AMD's faster on-die memory controller make up for its lack of L2.