Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Phenom Fire - 140 Watts?

AMD hosting more events lol.... shouldnt they be pouring funds into R&D.

Hehe the heat will melt the electrical tape holding together the K8's....

Nothing like winding up the AMD fanboys lol....

Will BTX return?

Well this is it, spending too too much time/money now trying to match intel (and atm theres no comparison) while it should be spent on R&D (the lads having too many champagne lunches). Ive seen a few posts about buying mobos for phenoms - makes no sense at all.... At the end of the day loyality means nothing in the technology game - all about performance/price (my E6850 suprises me all the time).

Oh the irony... the whole idea of BTX was created by Intel to save its overheating NetBurst CPUs... once they started making C2Ds they effectively dropped the technology... and now AMD might benefit from it. Life is a circle.

Glad those aren't my chestnuts roasting...

Actually, if this is true, it seems to have excellent power dissipation - it's dissipating lots of power in the form of heat. (Sorry, with all the crap Prescott...aka Presshott...got back when, I just couldn't resist.)

On a more serious note - I seem to recall from a few years back that one of the issues with SOI is that it becomes less effective at reducing leakage the smaller you go. AMD has some serious problems coming their way unless they (or IBM) really do have some sort of process fix ready for prime time. Bottom line with thermals - it doesn't matter if you can cool the chip or not - once it starts to heat up the user's room you've reached a thermal limit, and that seems to be about 140W to 150W.

You have forgotten that unlike IBM's Power series, AMD's chips are geared towards mass market.

Sure, AMD can get a 3~4Ghz golden chip from the wafer, but how often does that happen?

Now that you mentioned it, why didn't AMD released their duo core cpus first? That would probably be a lot better. Anyways, 140W. This isn't good at all. A Q6600 is only 95W and it can take the 9600 on. Even the B3 stepping was 105W.

Catchy title as always eh...

Too many times have someone brought up the "cell" processor which is in no way comparable to a normal CPU. In fact a QX9650 is much superior in terms that it has many more transistors than a "cell" processor and can do more than one thing at a time.

Either way, BTX was a great idea not only meant for the Prescott chips but for future use. Move the harddrives back and put the CPU in front where the cool air comes in. Its a great idea but its adoption wasn't taken at first just like ATX wasn't adopted at first.

Also, and I have said this many times, SOI has reached its limits and AMD has run into the same stumbling block Intel was at when they first went to 65nm. AMD needs a Hafnium based process(although they swear by SOI) in order to go to 45nm without having a mini nuke in any AMD based PC.

Personally that $622 million infusion should go towards fixing Phenom. Hell I think if AMD wants to make any money they need to leave ATI alone to do what they do instead of pushing them to make chipsets. Such a waste of a once great GPU company.

If you're implying he's talking about Cell, I don't believe he is:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/21546.wss

I don't know a whole lot about cpus, but I'm not sure IBM's Power6 chip qualifies as a "simple" chip.

The POWER6 has approximately 790 million transistors and 341 mm² large fabricated on an 65 nm process. It was released on the 8th June 2007, at speeds of 3.5 Ghz, 4.2 Ghz and 4.7 Ghz[2], but the company has noted prototypes have reached 6 GHz.[3] POWER6 reached first silicon in the middle of 2005[4].

Dr Frank Soltis, an IBM chief scientist, said IBM had solved power leakage problems associated with high frequency by using a combination of 90nm and 65nm parts in the POWER6 design.[5]

The processor is a dual core design and has 128 KiB of L1 cache (64 KiB data + 64 KiB instruction), an eight-way set-associative design with a two-stage pipeline supporting two independent 32-bit reads or one 64-bit write per cycle.[6] Each core will have a 4 MiB "semi shared" L2 cache, where the cache is assigned a specific core, but the other has a fast access to it. The two cores share a 32 MiB large L3 cache which is off die, using an 80 GB/s bus.[7]

Each core has two integer units, two binary floating-point units, and a decimal floating-point unit, and is capable of two way SMT. The binary floating-point unit incorporates “many microarchitectures, logic, circuit, latch and integration techniques to achieve [a] 6-cycle, 13-FO4 pipeline,” according to a company paper.[6] Unlike the servers from IBM's competitors, the POWER6 has hardware support for decimal arithmetic and will include the first decimal floating-point unit integrated in silicon. More than 50 new floating point instructions handle the decimal math and conversions between binary and decimal.[7] This is a feature being added to the processors powering IBM's System z.[8]

js, I work at Intel and even I will say that you're now being about as far out optimistic on the Intel side as certain people usually are on the AMD side. I do expect some...shall we say interesting...developments to come from that Larrabee test chip, but nothing quite as wild as you envision - not for a few more process generations anyhow.

BM - granted, the Power 6 is an impressive accomplishment. But given that IBM can produce them running at such high frequencies, that makes it even more curious that AMD has such serious issues with Barcelona. I could understand the GHz maxing out at a low speed due to chip design issues (LOTS of signal timing inside that has to be right to hit high clock speeds - and that's no trivial feat for any design team). But one also has to wonder about the thermals. How much wattage does that Power 6 chip consume? Is it significantly better (on a per transistor basis) than AMD's 65nm chips, and if so - why? I did see the part about IBM combining 65nm and 90nm in the chip - that was interesting - but what does it say about thermals on their 65nm SOI process?

* Not speaking for Intel Corp *

Just read over anandtech, in the review of the sparkle 8800Gt with passive cooling..

"you're not familiar with the QX9770, it's a quad-core 3.2GHz Penryn/Yorkfield based processor that won't be out until early 2008. It's got a TDP of 135W and manages to get quite warm"

Well, I guess that these TDP are normal, since IMHO135W is pretty close to 140w, given the memory controller is inside the CPU..

And more importantly, benchmarks.

HAHAHA PWND! i knew something bad would happen to amd. god this is depressing. i'm very surprised there are still people wanting to see BTX cases in the game.

Perhaps AMD is labeling the 2.6GHz '9900' because that is as far as they think they can go?

That's a bit optimistic if you ask me. Takes BM's comments with a world of salt. Blinded fanboy'ism can only get you so far. The PowerPC6 architecture is working fine for IBM. But don't expect it to give much help to AMD. They are in a tremendously bad situation atm. With their processors and IBM's heading in completely different directions. Just because IBM is having some success...doesn't mean it will filter down to AMD in their predicament. Even if they did ask IBM for help. This would not be a simple solution...It will also cost quite a bit of money which AMD isn't pulling in.

Personally...It will take some time for AMD to recover. Penryn isn't really that big of a problem. But if AMD doesn't find the lucky golden egg to solve their architecture issues by the time Nehalem comes around...They are going to be in big trouble. Who knows how big of a dent these Barcelona issues have placed on focused R&D research. It's most likely affected their roadmap and timeline for future releases. If they don't find a way out soon...This is going to be the worst possible situation for AMD. With their lack of R&D funding/staff/facilities...It might spell disaster if they don't get on the right track soon...Who's to blame?...Almost impossible to say. But, Hector Ruiz will definitely fall in at the top of the list.

Wrong. Intel has been measuring max TDP ever since Core 2 was released. In fact, Intel is generally quite conservative in their estimates, their '65W' CPUs are generally well under that, especially the lower end models.

http://www.lostcircuits.com/cpu/in [...] ld/4.shtml

See how the '65W' rated E6700/E6750 are well below 65W? The X6800 is rated at 75W and pulls 69W. The QX6700 and QX6850 are both 130W TDP chips and pull 115 - 118W. All the Core2 based CPUs are pulling less power than the official TDP rating.

Contrast that with the P4 840EE pulling 147W despite having a 130W TDP. Clearly Intel has changed the TDP measurements since Core2, I don't know if it is documented or not (never looked) but it is clear that the rating is more a 'max' rating than an 'average' rating.

For those who continues to cry "Intel's TDP is measured under "average" circumstance", here is the standard definition for Intel's TDP.

Worst case applications, which means maximum TDP draw realistically possible.

ftp://download.intel.com/design/p [...] 780406.pdf

Note: This is different from AMD's definition of TDP, although I can't find the standard definition for AMD's TDP. It is, however, likely that AMD rated their TDP based on maximum power draw a processor can sustain, which I suspect they turn on every single transistor in the die.

yomamafor1, dont twist words, unless its your prefered way of discussion, ofc Intel is measuring with some worst case apps (we dont know which, it may very be possible to push more W than that), but as I said, its not theoretical max as in AMD. Thats exactly why AMD introduced ACP, which is Intel's TDP analog.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/co [...] P_WPv7.pdf
http://www.betanews.com/article/Ba [...] 1189423401
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3091&p=2

etc.

OK, first of all... many wrong assumptions going on here. Intels and AMDs quoted TDPs are decidedly not comparable.

WRONG, exactly the opposite of that actually.

Thats what netburst was

Indeed.

To be fair, AMD introduced ACP because its maximum TDP is well above that of core2. AMD would like you to not hear about this though.

I guess my suggestion that we won't see an actual retail 4GHz chip was right on the money. And just because this is a bash AMD thread, I guess I can say that Hi-K is Hi-Krap.

AMD's TDP rating is higher than Intel's TDP and thats exactly what AMD was speaking for many years, where do you get "AMD would like you to not hear about this though"? AMD TDP > AMD ACP ~ Intel TDP, pretty much it. Still smiling over some ppl idea of Intel's TDP as max