No 45nm Salvation

AMD is “demoing” 45nm quad cores. The demos are doing little more than showing that these things work.

What is more interesting are AMD’s expectations of the eventual speed of these chips. Here’s one estimate of “at least” 2.8-3GHz. Here’s another estimate of “over 3GHz.”

Hopes and expectations are just that, but it should be noted that these are rather scaled-back hopes and expectations. Even if AMD hits these targets, these products are not going to look terribly good against Nehalems with integrated memory cores.

If you were expecting AMD to jump back into hot-and-heavy competition with Intel at 45nm, I think it’s safe to forget that. The K10.5s will look better than the K10s, and relatively less bad against Intel’s offerings, but the fight for the performance crown remains in hiatus.

It seems the real strategy for AMD the next twelve months is to retrench, play it safe with 45nm, get the product out the door, and hang on hoping for positive developments in the financial arena.

Ed


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