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65nm Athlons Debut With Lower Power Consumption

Posted by kdawson on from the less-of-the-same dept.

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."

5 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. It's a question of cores by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  2. As someone once said... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.

  3. Re:Interesting.. by joshetc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Duh, all athlon 64 dual cores to date are clock for clock nearly identical though. This means clock speed does matter. I can't believe you got modded up for making such a shitty assumption on a "geek" website.

  4. Re:HTPC by Ultra64 · · Score: 5, Funny

    right, because it's totally impossible for a computer to run more than one program at a time.
    it's too bad video playing couldn't happen on one cpu while video compression happened on another.
    someone should invent that. it could be called "Sametime Many Programs" or "SMP" for short.

  5. Re:SMP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Whooosh....!