There’s been a great deal of concern that AMD’s chips won’t be too terribly fast in 2007, mostly because AMD has said so so far.
Well, there’s some reason for optimism on this front. IBM will announce in February that its dual-core Power6 chip showing up in mid-2007 will be capable of
running at 5GHz+. While IBM had been making big claims for this chip for quite a while, the promised top number does seem to be increasing.
Obviously IBM and AMD’s CPUs represent different architectures, but if IBM can get twice the GHz from a 65nm chip over the current 90nm Power5, it would seem AMD could do a whole lot better than the current same or less its getting for its 65nm SOI.
Just as obviously, IBM hasn’t agreed to share the good SOI sauce with AMD yet, the way they did with AMD’s later 90nm chips, or at least AMD hasn’t figured out what it can do with it yet.
I don’t know. Maybe AMD hasn’t figured out what they can do with good SOI sauce yet. Maybe they haven’t gotten it yet. Maybe they don’t want it (i.e. pay extra for it).
Whatever the answer ends up being, at least for now, you can at least say that AMD at least theoretically could build chips fast enough to match Intel later next year.
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