Since the Athlon came out “cool” (at least as in temperature) and “Athlon” have rarely been close to one another in a sentence.
Now we have this article in EE Times, where an AMD engineer talks about SOI.
There’s this rather odd statement in the piece:
“For example, a hypothetical desktop processor using 70 watts will run an AMD bulk silicon processor with about 40 million transistors. Our 64-bit desktop processor, the AMD Athlon based on Hammer technology, will operate approximately 100 million transistors at the same 70 watts.”
This could well be true if that Hammer processor referred to is a Sledgehammer, but Clawhammer certainly isn’t going to have anything near 100 million transistors and stay around the size of current TBreds. Clawhammer will probably have something much closer to 40 than 100 million transistors.
Which means . . . Clawhammer should chew up far less power at, say, 2GHz than a TBred. Based on the charts in the article, more along the lines of 40 rather than 70 watts.
That would make Clawhammer, the quiet, gentler processor as compared to the comparatively heat-challenged .13 micron PIV furnaces, and even Prescott would have a rough time matching those figures.
This might have some interesting overclocking ramifications for the (whirling) fan-boys. 🙂
Might draw back the quiet folks, too.
Be the first to comment