For enterprises, the processors promise lower energy bills, and quieter and smaller desktop machines. Current dual-core AMD desktop chips typically consume 84 watts of power, while the newer products will use a maximum of 65 watts and 35 watts. New desktops boasting the chips are slated for release before June and will range from high-end Athlon64 x2 dual-core-powered machines to budget Sempron-run clients, said Dave Everitt, AMD’s European product and platforms manager.
He said to expect desktops with new form factors and a much smaller footprint, but declined to give specifics. Everitt would not name OEMs that are planning to launch these smaller machines, but said they would be the usual suspects.
The new chips will come at roughly a $40 price premium over their existing counterparts, which will mean the desktops they power will also have a higher price. Everitt was unable to quantify this increase but said it would not be substantial. This allows is our OEMs to deliver very differentiated competitive platforms and not at price premiums, he said.
The wattages AMD is promising for its new chips is based on maximum power consumption, rather than a chip’s typical power consumption, which is the public benchmark chief AMD rival Intel Corp tends to use, according to Everitt. In other words, AMD’s given wattages are based on a chip performing at its maximum workload, rather than its typical workload. For example, an AMD desktop chip that has a maximum power consumption of 35 watts uses just 14 watts of power for a typical workload, Everitt said.
Also unlike Intel, AMD will not market its forthcoming chips with a new brand name. That’s partly because AMD’s low-power technology is not quite new. Rather, the company’s existing low-wattage chip technology has reached a point where AMD can now churn it out at volume.
AMD’s Opteron for servers and Turion for mobile already use its low-wattage technology, called Silicon On Insulator, or SOI. After touting it for years, AMD launched SOI in 2005 with its 90-nanometer chip manufacturing node.
The new AMD Athlon64 X2 dual-core, AMD Athlon64 single-core and AMD Sempron processors are the same as the old ones, except they are built using SOI and are, therefore, boast lower-power envelopes. There are several 65 watt versions and one 35 watt version of the Athlon64 x2, while the regular Athlon64, which has just one core, is 35 watts.
Fundamentally, SOI reduce current leakage in a chip, which causes power dissipation. The base layer of a traditional silicon chip is a larger lump of silicon, on which transistors are built on in layers. However, because silicon is a semiconductor, it means electronics can escape. With SOI, AMD changed that base layer to be an insulator, rather than a semiconductor, so electrons can’t escape.
In the year or so since it launched SOI, AMD has gotten better at it and can now use it to manufacture its mainstream and budget desktop processors in volume. Or, as Everitt said, It became clear we could yield lower-power products. SOI was co-developed with IBM, which also uses the technology.
Everitt also pointed to AMD’s patented Automated Precision Manufacturing, or APM, process, which keeps it chip yields up and power down.
AMD’s longstanding Cool’n’Quiet technology, which matches a machine’s energy use to its process utilization and has been around since the late 90s, also helps, Everitt said.
Intel, on the other hand, is building its new low-powered processors on a new microarchitecture, which it calls Core, announced earlier this year. Santa Clara, California-based Intel is using the Core brand for many of its forthcoming low-powered wares.
Sunnyvale, California-based AMD, had its most recent microarchitecture refresh back in 2003, which included a dual-core chip interface for multiple-core products.
Everitt said AMD’s low-power SOI technology would also be used with a smaller 45-nm manufacturing process node at some future point. You will see more products in this power band, he said.
