Introduction

Often times when discussing CPUs, features such as the clock speed, number of cores, L2 cache size, and system bus/memory speeds are most frequently mentioned. But one trait that’s often overlooked is the manufacturing process.

For a CPU manufacturer like AMD or Intel, the manufacturing process is actually one of the CPU’s most important features. This is because the manufacturing process can often play a large role in not only the final CPU clock speed, but most importantly, the manufacturing cost of the CPU itself: the smaller the manufacturing process, the cheaper the CPU is to manufacture.

It has been over two years now since AMD introduced their first 90-nm CPUs. At the time these Athlon 64 CPUs were based on the Winchester core, but AMD has since gone on to produce newer, more advanced cores such as Venice/San Diego for single-core processors, as well as Toledo and most recently, Windsor for dual-core CPUs. Each of these new cores brought different innovations to the table that have helped AMD remain more than competitive with Intel over the years, but the bottom line is that they were all still 90-nm processors.

With the CPU industry moving at a breakneck pace, two years is an awfully long time to be stuck on the same process, plus Intel’s been mass producing their own CPUs at 65-nm for roughly a year now. Fortunately for AMD, their 65-nm manufacturing process has arrived and today we’re taking a look at one of the first CPUs based on the new process: AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 4800+.

The 4800+ chip

Nice idle temp!

Same old CPU

Historically when breaking in a new manufacturing process, AMD’s been pretty conservative when it comes to new features. Rather than use the opportunity to increase cache size (as Intel often does when introducing a new process) or crank up the clocks, AMD typically plays it safe, sticking with a die shrink only.

For the 65-nm transition, AMD sticks to this strategy once again – if you were expecting a significantly improved core with new features, we’re sorry to say that you’ll be disappointed. AMD’s focus right now is on making tweaks and improvements to the process itself, then once AMD’s got everything down at 65-nm, they’ll introduce enhanced CPU cores based on that tweaked, more mature 65-nm process. Without a doubt, the most talked about of these improved CPU cores is Barcelona (also known as K8L), but we won’t see that CPU on the desktop until the second half of 2007.

In other words, since AMD’s move to 65-nm is only a die shrink, don’t expect 65-nm CPUs to deliver faster performance than their 90-nm equivalents. Transistor count between AMD’s 90-nm and 65-nm CPUs is also the same at 153.8 million transistors.

What you will get from today’s 65-nm AMD CPUs though is better thermals. This is because the new 65-nm CPUs boast lower power consumption figures. AMD lists a peak power rating of 65W across the board for all their 65-nm CPUs. In comparison, AMD’s 90-nm CPUs ran at 89W max, with energy efficient models at 65W and 35W.

With the smaller process, die size is also reduced, down from 183mm2 to 126mm2 on AMD’s 65-nm processors. The new 65-nm CPU’s are built on AMD’s “Brisbane” core and all announced models to date ship with 512K L2 cache per processing core (1MB total L2 cache). Model numbers announced to date include the 5000+, 4800+, 4400+, and 4000+. The following chart summarizes AMD’s current CPU lineup as it stands today, for simplicity we’re just listing X2 and FX CPUs:

AMD Athlon 64 CPU Lineup As Of 12/18/06
Model Number	Clock Speed (GHz)	L2 Cache Size	Manufacturing Process	Thermal Design Power	Price
FX-74	3.0GHz	2MB	90-nm	125W	$999/pair
FX-72	2.8	2MB	90-nm	125W	$799/pair
FX-70	2.6GHz	2MB	90-nm	125W	$599/pair
FX-62	2.8GHz	2MB	90-nm	125W	$713
X2 5600+	2.8GHz	2MB	90-nm	89W	$505
X2 5400+	2.8GHz	1MB	90-nm	89W	$485
X2 5200+	2.6GHz	2MB	90-nm	89W	$403
X2 5000+	2.6GHz	1MB	90-nm	89W	$301
X2 5000+ Brisbane	2.6GHz	1MB	65-nm	65W	$301
X2 4800+	2.5GHz	1MB	65-nm	65W	$271
X2 4600+ Energy Efficient	2.4GHz	1MB	90-nm	65W	$240
X2 4600+	2.4GHz	1MB	90-nm	89W	$240
X2 4400+	2.3GHz	1MB	65-nm	65W	$214
X2 4200+	2.2GHz	1MB	90-nm	89W	$187
X2 4200+ Energy Efficient	2.2GHz	1MB	90-nm	65W	$187
X2 4000+	2.1GHz	1MB	65-nm	65W	$169
X2 3800+ Energy Efficient SFF	2.0GHz	1MB	90-nm	35W	N/A
X2 3800+ Energy Efficient	2.0GHz	1MB	90-nm	65W	$152
X2 3800+	2.0GHz	1MB	90-nm	89W	$152

As you can see, AMD isn’t charging a premium for their new 65-nm Brisbane processors. Unfortunately though when it comes to retail availability we’ve been told that most of AMD’s Brisbane CPUs are going to OEMs right now, the retail channel won’t see Brisbane arrive en masse until the beginning of 2007. Despite this, we were eager to see how the chip stacked up to similar X2 CPUs as well as the Core 2 from Intel.