Die size

[eobard]

I've been thinking about the newest AMD chips out and how they're so much hotter because the core is smaller and I just had an idea, couldn't AMD just make the core bigger? I don't mean increase the size of the circuit pathways, just increase the physical size of the core (have the outer areas just be blank material with no circuity in them). That way they'd have a built-in sink (sort of) that gets around the problems of improper contact or unsmooth contact surfaces. Of course you'd still need an add-on sink as well but it'd help alleviate the problem some. It'd also help deal with core crushes. If you chip off part of the core it'd be ok because the first mm or two wouldn't have any electronic guts in them. Does this not seem like a good idea?

[OC-Master]

AMD is going to be doing that in Barton. The proper word for what your talking about is Internal Heat Spreader.

Internal Heat Spreader is simply material that conducts and transfers heat at a rapid pace to releave the heat from the most intense areas of the CPU and deliver it to the cooler areas (edges).

In the Barton, the heat spreader is located around the 512KB L2 Cache.


DS-Master

[Demont]

hrrmmm yeah but then wouldnt that cost them a lot to add material to the actual core? i presume thats why intel has the heatspreader attatched to the cpu but not integrated into the core. hopefully hammer (or maybe even barton...) will have a nice copper heatspread built onto it. also i hope it would cool the sides of the core and stuff, thats quite a lot of extra uncooled surface area.

[eobard]

Originally posted by DS-Master
Internal Heat Spreader
Internal being the operative word. We're all familiar with external ones like whats on the K6-2's & 3's but if they put them on we'd only just wind up pulling them off to try to get better cooling by removing the extra layer. But having it internally integrated it'd eliminate one layer of (less than 100%) surface to surface contact. As for extra cost I think it'd be in their financial benefit to put the extra material in. As long as it doesn't wind up costing more to make the chips than it does to sell them then they will benefit in the long run. I know two people who bought P4's in the last month or two and their primary reason for not getting AMD chips was heat. If it costs a bit more per chip to reduce the heat but gets them a lot more customers then they should have been doing this all along.

[Docta_Z]

Cost...

[DaddyB]

yeah half of the reason for a die shrink is to be able to produce more cpu cores from a single platter of silicon, the Barton will have a larger core due to the added cache so it wont be putting out as much heat/mm2 as the Tbreds do... kinda like the P4 northy compared to the willy.

[residentevil2]

they did in the tbred's


the older failer 2200+ core size was 80.mm the new t bred B 2400+ and 2600+ the core is 84 mm

[danorthface]

that would be great, no more none working chipped cores!

[Oni]

The heat spreaders on the Barton are just a rumor. Any pics that you may have seen are just good photoshop jobs (I've heard that there are a few floating around). The reason the Barton core is projected as being larger than a Palomino core is just because of the extra cache that's being added. It'll be a Godsend, because that'll make the chips easier to cool! That, and they're supposed to run on like 1.50 vcore by default.