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Written by Michael Schuette
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Jan 05, 2009 at 04:00 PM |
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Page 2 of 18
Redefining the Stakes
In the middle of all these considerations, Intel dropped the Nehalem bomb. The new Core i7 processors are currently without competition when it comes to performance but they also have a few carefully manicured problems with power consumption and thermal load that have led to an entirely new way of massaging information within the tolerable limits. Moreover, there are cost issues to be taken into consideration, since there are no drop-in replacement platforms out there, a new motherboard and, because of the complete lack of legacy support, even new peripherals may be in order. For a completely new system, cost savings stemming from carry-over or hand-downs do not apply but in the aftermarket, those issues may well influence the purchasing decision.
AMD's Answer
AMD’s answer as revealed today is the new Phenom II line of CPU, based on the Deneb core, named after one of the brightest stars in the universe. Deneb is characterized by a surface temperature of 8400°K and appears 1.25 times larger than its real size.... .
Major silicon enhancements for 45nm AMD Phenom II
- 45nm immersion lithography manufacturing technology enables higher frequencies, tighter tolerances and lower current leakage
- 6MB L3 cache (up from 65nm Phenom's 2MB)
- 2-cycles faster than 65nm Phenom L3
- Increased DRAM bandwidth
- Cache flush on halt: Core's L1 and L2 flush into shared L3 after a core enters a halt state allowing the core to drop to a lower speed and save power
- Path-based indirect branch prediction
- 2x increase in core probe bandwidth
- Larger load/store buffering / larger floating point buffering / reduced MAB (missed buffer) lifetime
- Improved LOCK pipelineing: (LOCK is an instruction prefix) this improves performance when multiple LOCKS are in process simultaneously
- FP MOV compute optimization: Floating point register-to-register move instruction improvements
AMD Phenom II X4 940 and 920 Processor Specifications
| Processor Frequency: | X4 940 (Black Edition) = 3.0GHz / X4 920 = 2.8GHz |
| L1 Cache Sizes: | X4 64K of L1 instruction and 64K of L1 data cache per core (512KB total L1 per processor) |
| L2 Cache Sizes: | X4 512KB of L2 data cache per core (2MB total L2 per processor) |
| L3 Cache Size: | X4 6MB (shared) |
| Memory Controller Type: | X4 Integrated 128-bit wide memory controller * |
| Memory Controller Speed: | X4 Up to 1.8GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management |
| Types of Memory Supported: | X4 Support for unregistered DIMMs up to PC2 8500 (DDR2-1066MHz) |
| Memory Bandwidth: | X4 Up to 17.1GB |
| HyperTransport 3.0 Link: | X4 One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 3.6GHz full duplex (1.8GHz x2) |
| HyperTransport 3.0 Bandwidth: | X4 Up to 14.4GB/s |
| Total Processor Bandwidth: | X4 Up to 31.5 GB/s total bandwidth |
| Packaging: | X4 Socket AM2+ 940-pin organic micro pin grid array (micro-PGA) |
| Fab location: | X4 Fab 36 wafer fabrication facilities in Dresden, Germany |
| Process Technology: | X4 45-nanometer DSL SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology |
| Approximate Transistor count: | X4 ~ 758 million (45nm) |
| Approximate Die Size: | X4 258 mm2 (45nm) |
| Max Ambient Case Temp: | X4 62° Celsius |
| Nominal Voltage: | X4 0.875 - 1.5 Volts |
| Max TDP: | X4 125 Watts |
*NOTE: MC configurable for dual 64-bit channels for simultaneous read/writes
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Last Updated ( Feb 01, 2009 at 03:24 AM )
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