AMD's staff will be hitting the bar tomorrow.

This is amazing news from Intel. It is an exciting move.

Looking forward to cooler and longer running laptops in the near future.

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I wouldn't be surprised if the opposite was true. I'm really sick of all the hype on shrinking creates less heat. Look at the gpu industry, ever since they started shrinking things got hotter and hotter, and now it seems with i7 even though it's not a die shrink and we are use to 45nm by now, the new hardware to support minor changes in architecture of the cpu seem to make things run hotter.

I7 is way to hot. The newest GPU's run way to hot.

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The GPU's run hotter, because they pack double the transistors with a new shrink, than their previous HW... Reduction of the manufacturing process enables that we can have so much more transistors in the same place, of course it gets hot...

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For the CPU market, the problem is the ever growing amount of cache memory. Intel processors are designed with the large cache being their solution to improvements that AMD brings to the table.

I suspect that Intel will have more trouble after this move to the new fab process because the difficulty in moving to a new process node grows at an exponential rate. We saw Intel hit a wall with the Pentium 3 line because they were not ready for a new process shrink at that point, so the P4 came out. When Intel got their process technology on track, the people at Intel could go back to the Pentium 3 design(with improvements) to release the Core and Core 2 Duo.

There will come a time when an all new design will be needed in order to hold on to their lead, and that is when AMD will probably catch back up, if AMD can survive until then.


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Well said. I concur.

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Even though my last three CPUs were all from AMD (they made sense at the time- K6-III/400, Athlon XP 1700+, Athlon 64 X2 4400+), I have to disagree with your comment about the improvements (presumably the integrated memory controller) which AMD brings to the table.

With Core i7, Intel has effectively removed the one last technological advantage AMD had- faster memory access. The fact that Intel chips still tend to have larger L3 caches is quite simply because they can afford to give it to them, as they are ahead of AMD on the fab-process. For a high-end desktop chip where there is die-space to spare, you could add some more cores which will probably sit idle (keeping four busy is hard enough, especially with HT), but adding more L3 cache (so long as the latency of it is not adversely affected) is a very cheap and easy way to use up the space and provide a bit of a speedup in almost everything.

AMD is currently fighting a losing game. The Phenom II (bug-fixed Phenom) cannot compete with Core i7 with AMDs current fabs, and unlike Intel who have the tick-tock steady new-process, then new-design with large teams working on each step; AMD seem to have one team working on a new design, which has to be made to work with whichever process looks like the best option at the time.

We need AMD to survive for the x86 (or x64, who came up with that :p ) CPU market to be competitive, but I think the head of AMD is going to have to get into bed with the head of IBM, else they are doomed to fall ever further behind Intel in chip-design. The K10 is promising, but a long way off still, and AMD hasn't exactly been raking in the billions of dollars of profits recently to do that R&D. VIA have found an x86 CPU niche they can compete in, I fear that unless AMD pull an elephant out the hat with the K10, they'll have to slot in between VIA and Intel in providing CPUs specialising in a particular performance-sector, with Intel being the undisputed leader.

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What an utter load of BS. Thanks fanboy.

You get all that from wiki?

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I think you need to re-read the manufacturing roadmap page. It details the leakage gain (heat).

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That's because every time they shrink the chips they pack in new features and push the clock speed to the bleeding edge. If all they did was die shrink the old tech, we'd all be running something like an Atom CPU right now. Atoms closely resemble Pentium 3s, but on modern manufacturing only draw what? 5 watts?

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But you're making an unfair comparison - for example, the current latest GPUs have only been produced on the newest nodes, ever. Now, if we take for example, a Radeon 3870 vs. a Radeon 2900 XT, the former draws far less power and will overclock better on air, almost directly as a result of them shrinking from a 80nm to a 55nm process, despite them performing exactly the same. Another example is the Core 2 E8000 series and E6000 series. Despite the increase in cache size, the E8000 dissipates little enough heat that they can provide them with a very tiny heatsink compared to the earlier 65nm cores, and objectively they draw much less power at the same clock speed because they run at lower volts.

You can see this sort of thing again and again throughout the technology industry, Coppermine (180nm) -> Tualatin(130nm), GeForce 7800 -> 7900, G80 -> G92, etc., etc.

If you were to compare say, a GTX280 to a 8800 GTX and say the former draws much more power than the 8800 GTX, AND it's produced on a smaller process - well, yes, but that's because they've clocked it higher and there are far more transistors (twice as many, in fact).

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