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65nm Athlons Debut With Lower Power Consumption
TheRaindog writes "AMD has finally rolled out Athlon 64 X2 processors based on 65nm process technology, and The Tech Report has an interesting look at their energy usage and overclocking potential compared to current 90nm models. The new 65nm chips consume less power at idle and under load than their 90nm counterparts, and appear to have plenty of headroom for overclocking. An Athlon 64 X2 5000+ that normally runs at 2.4 GHz was taken all the way up to 2.9 GHz with standard air cooling and only a marginal voltage boost, suggesting that we may see faster chips from AMD soon."
AMD processors are nice as long as you use them at their nominal clock.
I've had bad experiences overclocking AMD processors (considering extended usage >6 months and at 100% load) with proper refrigeration. Unfortunately those processors tend do break (with no prior warning) eventually. What's a pity, since they overclock well.
There are worse processors in this aspect though, the UltraSPARC (at least the "I" models) may die after few years user nominal clock and standard refrigeration.
I've never had problems overclocking an Intel processor. Perhaps because they already irradiate lots of heat (and are built with that in mind), those processors seem to have a good resistance to overclocking and, when things are going bad, they tend to become unstable (and more sensitive to temperature) instead of just dying immediately.
Try "Symmetric Multiprocessing"
The cesspool just got a check and balance.