On Thoroughbred et al... from the rumor mill
About that scalability thing, there were some interesting rumors floating around (realworldtech) that AMD was using <70nm Leffs to get the higher XP bins. There appears to be some truth to this, as the much more "cost-effective" Durons are still just hitting 1.3GHz, indicating that the Leffs are inline with the current speed of the AthlonXPs. Add further to this the fact that Thoroughbred may be released at 1.6V, whereas Tualatin was released at 1.45V, leads me to suspect that their die areas are shrinking on their new process, but their transistor Leffs aren't. Pure speculation, but the high voltage may not be for 'compatibility' reasons: AMD may actually NEED that voltage to maintain their speed margins over their current hybrid .13/.18.
It would be interesting what kind of improvements SOI will bring to the Thoroughbred core.
Hammer on the other hand looks to be a very aggressive design and, from the looks of it, very power hungry. AMD has to be aggressively designing their logic to get what speed benefits they can on the Athlon core, and counting on SOI to bring down the power target. What interests me is that Hammer looks to be a clustered architecture. I'm speculating but it looks like it is possible to avoid the penalties associated with typical cluster architectures by limiting path selection on condition branch points. If so, that would be an extremely power hungry solution.
Quote:
Originally posted by Arcadian:
Xbit Labs has a link to a French site with Northwood benchmarks.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/story.html?id=1008705480
It looks like Northwood has 7-16% more IPC than Willamette. A 2.2GHz Northwood beats the Athlon XP 1900+ in every single test - and that's using DDR, not RDRAM.
Northwood also easily overclocked to 2.53GHz with a 533MHz front side bus. Benchmarks on the overclock show a 6-27% performance advantage over the Athlon XP 1900+. Of course, we know that Athlon XP processors have a good amount of headroom, too, so if they were both overclocked, it wouldn't be such a difference. Still, the power of the early Northwood processors is quite profound. Intel may yet steal the performance lead again.
Arcadian
