Rumor: AMD Stepping Up 45nm Timetable?
As with all rumors, please take the following news item with a grain of salt until we can receive official confirmation or denial from AMD.
For those of you who've been hoping for a more competitive high-end CPU landscape, it seems that your wishes might be met as early as the end of this year:
“...the inputs from trusted Far Eastern friends about the 45 nm desktop parts say that, if AMD does its job right, we're gonna have a quad-core 6MB cache part running at 3.2 GHz with DDR2-1066 memory a few months before year's end.”
It makes a lot of sense for AMD to be throwing their effort into getting 45nm parts shipping as quickly as they can. At this point their 65nm technology is producing chips that are physically larger than Intel's latest and greatest 45nm chips. The result is that AMD has much smaller margins than Intel does, and cannot currently lay a claim to the performance throne in either the desktop or mobile arenas, which ultimately means that their margins are cut even further.
If AMD does get its 45nm technology rolling out later this year, we might see them leapfrog Intel by releasing an 8-core series of CPUs. AMD has already made rumblings about regretting not investing more time in looking at Intel's two-chips per die approach. An 8-core CPU, even running at relatively low speeds, could put AMD in an interesting position in the server CPU market.
For those of you who've been hoping for a more competitive high-end CPU landscape, it seems that your wishes might be met as early as the end of this year:
“...the inputs from trusted Far Eastern friends about the 45 nm desktop parts say that, if AMD does its job right, we're gonna have a quad-core 6MB cache part running at 3.2 GHz with DDR2-1066 memory a few months before year's end.”
It makes a lot of sense for AMD to be throwing their effort into getting 45nm parts shipping as quickly as they can. At this point their 65nm technology is producing chips that are physically larger than Intel's latest and greatest 45nm chips. The result is that AMD has much smaller margins than Intel does, and cannot currently lay a claim to the performance throne in either the desktop or mobile arenas, which ultimately means that their margins are cut even further.
If AMD does get its 45nm technology rolling out later this year, we might see them leapfrog Intel by releasing an 8-core series of CPUs. AMD has already made rumblings about regretting not investing more time in looking at Intel's two-chips per die approach. An 8-core CPU, even running at relatively low speeds, could put AMD in an interesting position in the server CPU market.
