AMD 90nm CPU Review: 3000+, 3200+ & 3500+

Omega65Omega65 Philadelphia, Pa
edited December 2004 in Science & Tech
Xbitlabs grabs ahold of the 3 currently available 90nm Athlon 64 CPUs and puts them through the ringer!

"The second part of our overclocking experiments was performed with the Vcore increased by 8.3%: up to 1.52V. This pretty insignificant voltage growth has had a great positive effect on the overclocking results......This way, the maximum frequency we managed to achieve by overclocking AMD Athlon 64 3500+ on Winchester core appeared 2.618GHz."
Besides the reduction of production costs of the Athlon 64 processors, the launch of the 90nm technology allowed to improve their heat generation rate. While the 130nm NewCastle processors generated around 89W of heat, the 90nm Winchester solutions boast a much lower value of only 67W. This way, AMD managed to avoid leakage current issues, which caused Intel a lot of trouble during 90nm Prescott production: as you know the heat dissipation of Pentium 4 Prescott processors got notably lower than that of 130nm Pentium 4 Northwood CPUs.

Moreover, in the upcoming E0 core stepping, which are due next year, AMD should introduce a few additional features. First of all, these processor dies will support SSE3 instructions, which have been implemented in Pentium 4 Prescott processors from the very beginning. Secondly, there will be 4 write combining buffers in the upcoming 90nm Athlon 64 cores instead of 2. And thirdly, AMD is planning to improve their power consumption. The today’s Athlon 64 based on Winchester D0 core stepping is similar to Athlon 64 on NewCastle CG core stepping.
It would have been nice to see the 3500+ 2.6ghz OD'd results in the benchmark tables.

Source: XbitLabs

Comments

  • EMTEMT Seattle, WA Icrontian
    edited December 2004
    Methinks there's a typo in the title here
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