December 8th, 2008
AMD rolls out 45nm desktop CPUs ... maybe ... or not
[UPDATE: A bit of digging into this story seems to indicate that EE Times may have jumped the gun on this announcement. There's no announcement from AMD, and people close to the action say the launch date will be Jan 8th ... a month from now. Folks with their finger on the channel pulse say there are no Phenom II chips in the system.Some are dubious that Phenom II will release in 65nm and 45nm ... the backward compatibility would be great because AMD would be able to get folks with older AM2 CPUs to upgrade, but again there's no sign of that.
Also, the EE Time's seems to have pulled the story ...]
According to EE Times, AMD has announced the 45nm Phenom II processors.
The Phenom II processors will run at 2.8GHz ($235) and 3.0GHz ($275) and will come in both 65nm for the AM2+ socket/DDR2 and 45nm for the AM3 socket DDR2/3 flavors. These processors provide a performance boost of up to 20% compared to the original Phenom CPUs.
The CPUs will be available for the new AMD Dragon platform which will feature the AMD 790GX chip set and Radeon HD 3800 graphics processors, and support both DDR2 and DDR3 memory (supporting memory speeds up to 1,333MHz). The CPUs will also support RAID 5 and feature tools to make overclocking easier and safer.
Chips featuring the CPUs will debut at CES in January.
Now here’s a question. How do these CPUs hold up against Intel’s Core i7 offerings? The high-end i7 965 which runs at 3.2GHz retails for $999, while the low-end i7 920 running at 2.66GHz retails for $284. If the 2.8GHz Phenom II can come close to, or maybe even beat the 920 then AMD have a chance at gaining some ground on Intel. Benchmarks will reveal the true leader of the pack.
Most people have long given up on measuring GHz, but given that AMD has enter the 45nm desktop game only 200MHz behind the Extreme Edition Core i7, I expect Intel to push more i7’s out of the door sooner rather than later.
Adrian is a technology journalist and author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology. He also runs a popular blog called The PC Doctor. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations
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