AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 65-nm Brisbane Preview

[qurious69ss]

Just like the title says.

http://news.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_athlon_64_4800_65-nm_preview/default.asp

 

[djplanet]

Business as usual. But I can't understand why AMD doesn't produce anything above the X2 5000 at 65nm. Seems logical to me to make the best chips out of the best process.

 

[cmptrdude79]

They like to start with their more mainstream models until they can get yields right. Makes sense to me, as I wouldn't want to be throwing away defective FX CPUs...much better to have to chuck a few X2s.

-J

 

[SEALBoy]

Those are some wicked-low temps...

Overclocks to about 2.8... not very impressive...

Still handed its ass by the E6600

And why does the X2 4800 lose to the X2 4600 in most benchmarks? Someone explain that to me.

 

[turpit]

For one thing, they generate less power than their 90-nm counterparts. In our testing total system power consumption at equal clock speeds with our X2 4800+ was 11W lower under load than the equivalent X2 CPU at 90-nm. 11W doesn’t sound like much, but in practice our X2 4800+ CPU generated significantly less heat: temps were down up to 26 degrees Celsius under load.

Dam. I was hoping 65nm would generate more power. It would have helped cut down on the 4x4 electric bill.

I know, I know, it was a typo, but I couldnt resist

 

[sirheck]

makes me feel better with my s939

 

[YO_KID37]

Well At least you have the liberty of touching yourself inappropriately at your computer because you at bare minimum have a Worthy Dual Core
(Anything better than a Pentium is "worthy"). !Look at my setup. I'm so far behind in CPU technology it takes me 7 Minutes for a Boot-up to Usable state On this POSS.

 

[gr8mikey]

Good find, thanks...



Where is Endyen.... did I not predict this ....

Jack

Careful Jack! This sounds kind of BM ish.

 

[sirheck]

:lol:

 

[qcmadness]

Business as usual. But I can't understand why AMD doesn't produce anything above the X2 5000 at 65nm. Seems logical to me to make the best chips out of the best process.

That's the problem, right now 65 nm is not their best process .... something is fishy with what they presented to the world with the 40% improvement headline and what we are seeing.

Also, very oddly --- the die size for the 512KBx2 brisbane core is 112.7 mm^2 compared to ~183 mm^2 for Windsor.... this is not a 50% area scaling that would indicate a true 65 nm shrink.

My suspicion is they did not scale the pitch down as much in order to get the extra power savings, or SOI is not allowing a perfect pitch scaling due to self-heating. Hard to tell...

(Link for die size: http://www.semiconductor.com/mysi/index.asp?destination=513 requires registration, it is free to get the cover sheet that specifies the die size).

Jack

It sounds that the 112.7mm^2 represents 65nm 1MB L2 x2 dies...

 

[SEALBoy]

Quick question:

Isn't 10C and 14C kind of low temp, even at idle? I mean, that would be actually cool to the touch, if you could touch the CPU.

 

[darious00777]

Well At least you have the liberty of touching yourself inappropriately at your computer because you at bare minimum have a Worthy Dual Core
(Anything better than a Pentium is "worthy"). !Look at my setup. I'm so far behind in CPU technology it takes me 7 Minutes for a Boot-up to Usable state On this POSS.

Odd, it takes less then a minute on my PIII 933 mhz, pc133 CL3 computer. Then again, I never shut it off, so I could be off on my boot time. Least you've got the benefit of dual channel with DDR, I would think. All hail my legacy computer. Thank God it kicks it against something out there.

 

[evilr00t]

Well At least you have the liberty of touching yourself inappropriately at your computer because you at bare minimum have a Worthy Dual Core
(Anything better than a Pentium is "worthy"). !Look at my setup. I'm so far behind in CPU technology it takes me 7 Minutes for a Boot-up to Usable state On this POSS.

Odd, it takes less then a minute on my PIII 933 mhz, pc133 CL3 computer. Then again, I never shut it off, so I could be off on my boot time. Least you've got the benefit of dual channel with DDR, I would think. All hail my legacy computer. Thank God it kicks it against something out there.

Holy sh1t, I have a P3 933 with 512M CL3 RAM too! It boots in 56 seconds, from a 10000rpm SCSI hard drive.

 

[darious00777]

Well At least you have the liberty of touching yourself inappropriately at your computer because you at bare minimum have a Worthy Dual Core
(Anything better than a Pentium is "worthy"). !Look at my setup. I'm so far behind in CPU technology it takes me 7 Minutes for a Boot-up to Usable state On this POSS.

Odd, it takes less then a minute on my PIII 933 mhz, pc133 CL3 computer. Then again, I never shut it off, so I could be off on my boot time. Least you've got the benefit of dual channel with DDR, I would think. All hail my legacy computer. Thank God it kicks it against something out there.

Holy sh1t, I have a P3 933 with 512M CL3 RAM too! It boots in 56 seconds, from a 10000rpm SCSI hard drive.

Man, I feel like a 'tard now. Decided to shut down and restart. Took 2 minutes and 10 seconds. Still beats out seven minutes though. ATA100 hard drive.

Might I guess that you're using a PCI or PCI-e card for the SCSI connection? Don't know too much about them, but I figured the only way I could get one of those high powered hard drives would be to get an expansion card. Always figured a bigger bottleneck for my system though was being maxed out at 512 megs though.

 

[mpjesse]

Quick question:

Isn't 10C and 14C kind of low temp, even at idle? I mean, that would be actually cool to the touch, if you could touch the CPU.

Yep... 14C translates to 57F, which would be cool to the touch.

I'm not totally conviced those temps are accurate. They're using a well known and accurate tool (Core Temp), but 14C idle seems way out whack. Esp. considering they weren't able to push the CPU beyound 2.8Ghz. I can squeeze 2.8Ghz out of my 4800+ Toledo.

Dunno. Seems weird. But if that temp is accurate, it's nothing less than amazing!

 

[SEALBoy]

I wonder how cool it can go with liquid cooling...

 

[YO_KID37]

Well At least you have the liberty of touching yourself inappropriately at your computer because you at bare minimum have a Worthy Dual Core
(Anything better than a Pentium is "worthy"). !Look at my setup. I'm so far behind in CPU technology it takes me 7 Minutes for a Boot-up to Usable state On this POSS.

Odd, it takes less then a minute on my PIII 933 mhz, pc133 CL3 computer. Then again, I never shut it off, so I could be off on my boot time. Least you've got the benefit of dual channel with DDR, I would think. All hail my legacy computer. Thank God it kicks it against something out there.

Holy sh1t, I have a P3 933 with 512M CL3 RAM too! It boots in 56 seconds, from a 10000rpm SCSI hard drive.

Man, I feel like a 'tard now. Decided to shut down and restart. Took 2 minutes and 10 seconds. Still beats out seven minutes though. ATA100 hard drive.

Might I guess that you're using a PCI or PCI-e card for the SCSI connection? Don't know too much about them, but I figured the only way I could get one of those high powered hard drives would be to get an expansion card. Always figured a bigger bottleneck for my system though was being maxed out at 512 megs though.

I've Got no such luxury I've got a DDR-333 RAM Motherboard Running 2 DDR400 RAm Without any Form of Dual-channel. I've got every thing Over clocked a little and a Previous generation Pentium 3 With 1/2 the speed of ram still can beat me to a Boot-up It maybe my hard drive or it may be that i've got 14 Gigs of programs loaded on this Harddrive which i doubt is any faster than 1Mb per second( correction maximum write is 1.6Mb/s and read is 4Mb/s Is this anywhere near the speed of 2 RAID-0 RAPTORs?

I guess anybody with anything faster than a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 or Athlon Xp 2400+ o/b now can have "sexytime" with them selfs. Well there are quite a few people here that have Much Slower computers than mine but those are very few. Most of the people here have Athlon64 or Pentium D and better

 

[darious00777]

Don't know what it could be. For myself, I suppose a little bit could have to do with some kind of "Get the thing booted quick" mentality that could have been behind the design of the board. Read somewhere that under the proper settings, this thing could get booted in 8 seconds with Win2K.

 

[mpjesse]

what's also strange to me is the article makes no mention (except for the caption) on how cool it runs. are they intentionally misleading people? you'd think the real story would be how cool the CPU runs.

but that's just me...

 

[1Tanker]

Well At least you have the liberty of touching yourself inappropriately at your computer because you at bare minimum have a Worthy Dual Core
(Anything better than a Pentium is "worthy"). !Look at my setup. I'm so far behind in CPU technology it takes me 7 Minutes for a Boot-up to Usable state On this POSS.

Odd, it takes less then a minute on my PIII 933 mhz, pc133 CL3 computer. Then again, I never shut it off, so I could be off on my boot time. Least you've got the benefit of dual channel with DDR, I would think. All hail my legacy computer. Thank God it kicks it against something out there.

Holy sh1t, I have a P3 933 with 512M CL3 RAM too! It boots in 56 seconds, from a 10000rpm SCSI hard drive.

Man, I feel like a 'tard now. Decided to shut down and restart. Took 2 minutes and 10 seconds. Still beats out seven minutes though. ATA100 hard drive.

Might I guess that you're using a PCI or PCI-e card for the SCSI connection? Don't know too much about them, but I figured the only way I could get one of those high powered hard drives would be to get an expansion card. Always figured a bigger bottleneck for my system though was being maxed out at 512 megs though.

I've Got no such luxury I've got a DDR-333 RAM Motherboard Running 2 DDR400 RAm Without any Form of Dual-channel. I've got every thing Over clocked a little and a Previous generation Pentium 3 With 1/2 the speed of ram still can beat me to a Boot-up It maybe my hard drive or it may be that i've got 14 Gigs of programs loaded on this Harddrive which i doubt is any faster than 1Mb per second( correction maximum write is 1.6Mb/s and read is 4Mb/s Is this anywhere near the speed of 2 RAID-0 RAPTORs?

I guess anybody with anything faster than a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 or Athlon Xp 2400+ o/b now can have "sexytime" with them selfs. Well there are quite a few people here that have Much Slower computers than mine but those are very few. Most of the people here have Athlon64 or Pentium D and betterSounds like you're running in PIO mode. Check and make sure that DMA is enabled.

 

[YO_KID37]

Oh Thank god, I've just done a proper Si soft Sandra bench Mark My Read work is are 27MB/s and My Write work is 25MB/s At least that's much better than what i previously thought.

 

[cwj717]

what's also strange to me is the article makes no mention (except for the caption) on how cool it runs. are they intentionally misleading people? you'd think the real story would be how cool the CPU runs.

but that's just me...

The data as it is unfolding is clear that AMD is running about 8-12 watts lower in power during idle than Intel --- 3 sites now, different chipsets and the results appear consistent.

What I am curious about is how much is due to SOI/65 nm and how much is due to C&Q (i.e. what speed - clock speed, is it throttling to in idle mode). Honestly, it is beside the point -- 12 watts is nothing -- it will be a big braggin' point I am sure, but 12 watts at $0.12 per KWH amounts to about $1.00 per month more in the electric bill.

At load, it is a wash --- in some loads Intel is lower by 3-5 watts, in others AMD is lower by 3-5 watts. Close enough to call a draw in that scenario.

I do not trust any of the temperatures reported just yet, these are varying wildly including.... 14 deg C at idle --- this is not possible unless they are testing outside in the fall/winter or inside a walk in refrig. ....

It is fun to watch the site paint a positive light on this.... TR and FSQD are both dwelling on the positive low idle power. The OC results are disappointing though.

I think the idle power difference is because of C&Q. This is from the Anand article:

"Note that Cool 'n Quiet and EIST were enabled for all tests, but running at 1GHz the AMD CPUs at idle are able to draw much less power than the Intel system (which runs at an idle clock speed of 1.6GHz)."

Notice that the AMD cpu was 1GHz at idle and the Intel one is at 1.6GHz... also, since AMD has the memory controller on-die it also may clock the ram lower during idle. I am pretty sure i read that somewhere, ill look for a link.

EDIT: I loled at those Temps. though... there are people that actually believe those are correct??

 

[cwj717]

Business as usual. But I can't understand why AMD doesn't produce anything above the X2 5000 at 65nm. Seems logical to me to make the best chips out of the best process.

That's the problem, right now 65 nm is not their best process .... something is fishy with what they presented to the world with the 40% improvement headline and what we are seeing.

Also, very oddly --- the die size for the 512KBx2 brisbane core is 112.7 mm^2 compared to ~183 mm^2 for Windsor.... this is not a 50% area scaling that would indicate a true 65 nm shrink.

My suspicion is they did not scale the pitch down as much in order to get the extra power savings, or SOI is not allowing a perfect pitch scaling due to self-heating. Hard to tell...

(Link for die size: http://www.semiconductor.com/mysi/index.asp?destination=513 requires registration, it is free to get the cover sheet that specifies the die size).

Jack

It sounds that the 112.7mm^2 represents 65nm 1MB L2 x2 dies...

Actually, this is a good point --- I forgot they were re-implementing 1MBx2, this would scale correctly then.

However, why on earth is Anand and Firingsquad reporting this:

With the smaller process, die size is also reduced, down from 183mm2 to 126mm2

I think those reports are probably just inaccurate... I could be wrong though. Its also possible that it isn't a linear decrease in size... although like I said I could be wrong

 

[geralt]

Quick question:

Isn't 10C and 14C kind of low temp, even at idle? I mean, that would be actually cool to the touch, if you could touch the CPU.

Yep... 14C translates to 57F, which would be cool to the touch.

I'm not totally conviced those temps are accurate. They're using a well known and accurate tool (Core Temp), but 14C idle seems way out whack. Esp. considering they weren't able to push the CPU beyound 2.8Ghz. I can squeeze 2.8Ghz out of my 4800+ Toledo.

Dunno. Seems weird. But if that temp is accurate, it's nothing less than amazing!

Actually, if AMD did not spec out their ODTD correctly and the current temp reporting software is not calibrated to give accurate temperatures. This also happened on C2D, lots of debate on accurate temps.

14 degrees idle is impossible unless they did their benching in a walking refrigerator, else the laws of physics cease to exist in their AMD computer. :lol:

Naah, maybe they just saving on their heating bills? They did not mention temperature in the room.
Anybody knows where they are located?

 

[1Tanker]

Quick question:

Isn't 10C and 14C kind of low temp, even at idle? I mean, that would be actually cool to the touch, if you could touch the CPU.

Yep... 14C translates to 57F, which would be cool to the touch.

I'm not totally conviced those temps are accurate. They're using a well known and accurate tool (Core Temp), but 14C idle seems way out whack. Esp. considering they weren't able to push the CPU beyound 2.8Ghz. I can squeeze 2.8Ghz out of my 4800+ Toledo.

Dunno. Seems weird. But if that temp is accurate, it's nothing less than amazing!

Actually, if AMD did not spec out their ODTD correctly and the current temp reporting software is not calibrated to give accurate temperatures. This also happened on C2D, lots of debate on accurate temps.

14 degrees idle is impossible unless they did their benching in a walking refrigerator, else the laws of physics cease to exist in their AMD computer. :lol:

Naah, maybe they just saving on their heating bills? They did not mention temperature in the room.
Anybody knows where they are located?North Pole.