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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."
The little gem in this story is the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ EE SFF 2.0GHz. At 35W, that sounds like a perfect CPU choice for a super-silent HTPC.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
If you have only one core, you need to rely on the OS to not get in the way of running processes during task switches. With more than one core, processes can be split amongst the cores so that they do not need to be interrupted all the time by the OS timer interrupt handler. The more cores you have, the better you can scale up, even if the cores themselves are slower than a competing single core chip.
It's like driving down the highway in your train vs riding the rails in your Audi. Sure, you can try to drive the car on the train tracks for a while, but eventually the springs will break and your tires will pop and you end up walking to your final destination. But if you took the train, you'd probably tear up the road and it would take a while since you couldn't get much traction with the large metal wheels, but since you're carrying a whole lot of stuff in the train cars being pulled behind you, your bandwidth / time ratio is very favorable.
considering my 3800+ X2 runs at 2.8ghz with 1.5V. 2.9ghz really doesnt seem like much for a higher end model.. I'm thinking they will need at least 3.1ghz or so overclocks on air to have much of a chance in most highend enthusiast rigs.
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
Anand has a nice review of these new processors, including performance comparisons.
The surprise is that it was a little slower than it's 90nm counterpart. They chased it down to the cache latency going up from 90nm to the 65nm part.
Other than that, it looks good.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
...But most of the time irrelevant.
Anandtech has two good reviews here (lower power) and here (lower performance)
The main reason is the increase of L2 Cache Latency from 12 cycles to 20. But in most of the benchmarks the difference is very low.
Next time your class stud mentions his 9", you can counter by mentioning that your 6.5" consumes less power and gets the job done faster!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Whooosh....!
If you are about to buy a AMD chip, ensure you buy a AM2 version, this is becuase non-AM2 versions do no support low level Hardware Virtualization (which means that XEN - and competitiors - can only operate in a paravirtualization mode)
Apparently Brisbane (65nm) has a 20-cycle L2 cache latency, vs. the 12-cycle latency from the 90nm versions. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2893&p=3
They used the same video card on the Intel test rig too. They're just trying to keep as many components as possible in common between the platforms so that the power draw comparisons are more useful.
Not too complicated really. As to why they chose that particular video card, I don't know, but I'd wager that the reviewer just had it on hand.
We really need a "Whoosh" mod.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
I overclocked the very first stepping of the first 500 Mhz Athlon to 700 Mhz and it has been running 24/7 for 6 years. Now, it is finally being replaced with a newer (AMD of course) system and I opened up the case for salvage parts and there...there was the overclocking board still attached to the 'Slot A' CPU and still working perfectly. I'd forgotten it was even there. So there's a 6-year data point on the overclocking/longevity scale.
Obvious troll, but I'll bite. The 32-bit Sempron is nothing more or less than the continuation of the old 32-bit Athlon XP CPU line, and Semprons carrying the same numerical designation as their old Athlon XP counterparts have exactly the same specs. Why they changed the name I'm not exactly sure, but it's still the exact same CPU. Celerons on the other hand are just Pentiums without most of the L2 cache, which makes them heavily crippled since the P4 with its long pipeline depends very much on their on-die cache.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Whenever AMD or Intel moves to a new process, they do not expect much from the first cores(they are happy if they get as many cores from a wafer as they did before-which if my sources are correct, Intel didn't do, and AMD has).
A lot of people forget that when Intel moved to 65nm, the new chips were slower in many ways, and the clock speeds were lower than the top end 90nm P4's.
By industry standards these AMD 65nm chips are a SUCCESS.
My only beef with the 65nm Athlons is that I cannot buy one at newegg, or order one from DELL. In my world, if I cannot order a PC with one, or buy it at newegg, IT IS A PAPER LAUNCH!
I have posted an update to my initial look at AMD's 65nm processors here:
http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/11486
The update addresses some anomalies in L2 cache performance and raises some possibly related questions about die sizes for the 65nm Athlon 64 X2. It appears this chip is not just a die shrink with the same performance characteristics, after all.