>Several small details point to that, actually. Yonah is to
>have TDP of 31W as far as I know, or at least around that,
>with both cores on and running. And hey, that seems to be,
>indeed, 15% more than Dothan, but who cares?
Actually, that is between 50% more and 3x (!) as much as Dothan, which has a TDP of 10-21W afaik. And you should care, if you care about thin and light.
See there are 2 issues with notebooks in this context: TDP and iddle/sleep power consumption. THe first one is going to define the cooling setup. Even if Yonah would rarely use 31W IRL, the cooling solution has to be able to accomodate that much, and 31W is just a nono for ultraportables. Its the same reason you dont see any ultralights with a mobile A64, even though it "only" boasts a TDP of 35W if I'm not mistaken. Its just too much to handle.
The second issue, iddle/sleep power consumption will for most people play a much more important role in determining battery life than TDP. Most laptops are iddling 95% of the time on batteries, using things like word, internet, email etc (Few people will actually run a game or 3DS on batteries, but those that do, should care about TDP more). Now Banias/Dothans excellent battery life is mostly due to the fact it uses incredibly little power when iddling. Its *far* better in this regard than for instance mobile A64, much more than its TDPs would lead you to believe. And most of the current still used, is, you guessed it: leakage. So you can't just say you don't care about it, because it *will* to a very large degree determine battery life. With dual cores, chances are Yonah will be (considerably) worse in this regard, unless intels 65nm provides very significant improvements here (not unlikely, but not a given either).
So combined, with Yonah compared to Dothan, you might well end up with a pretty much bigger laptop, with much more limited battery life and only sporadic advantages of using dual core (and even then, only unplugged). The first one (bigger, heavier) is pretty much a given (unless they also bring out ULV versions with sub 15W TDP), the second one (worse battery life) no more than just a guess/fear.
>On other fronts: It will feature a shared 2MB L2 cache. Does
> any other processor from Intel and AMD have that? Nope
The jury is still out if a shared cache is better than a unified cache for DC. My guess is it will depend on the app, but I would not expect a big difference either way. Further more, bigger caches result in diminishing returns. Going from banias (1MB) to Dothan (2MB) gave only a tiny performance boost per clock. Probably the reason intel is going back to 1MB per core (if I read you right).
>Nope. It will feature improvements in SSE2 and SSE3 will be
>included; plus,
SSE2 is already in there (Dothan), and SSE3.. see AMD64 venice benchmarks, the benefit is so small, its completely neglectable.
>plus, there'll be an improvement in Dothan's low point,
>which is FP calculations
Thats good, it needs a better FPU badly. It also needs better SSE2 performance, maybe that will be reworked as well ?
>Add to that a 667Mhz FSB and you're probably set: this is
>quite a great chip.
We've seen overclocked results of Dothan on 680 MHz bus, and the increases over 533 are underwhelming.
>If it were to be launched preemptively in 3Q05, it would
>make AMD sweat...
I don't think so, AMD has no marketshare in the mobile market anyway, they have nothing to lose
Seriously though, I'm not saying it will be a bad chip, far from, but I don't quite see it being a killer chip either. Single threaded (unplugged) performance it will have a hard time against even 90nm Turions. Multithreaded performance is a questionable requirement for most mobile uses, and it AFAIK it will still lack 64 bit support; now that is not such a big issue for a laptop either, but it still bites to market a highend laptop that is unable to run the latest version of windows. As for battery life, its anyone's guess, but I have seen no evidence it will significantly worse or better than Turion, but it looks like it might be a step back from Dothan.
>I understand you're being cautious, but I'm not sure you
>need to be too pessimistic...
I understand you're being optimistic, but I'm not sure you need to start hyping it already
You're making a lot of assumptions and expressing hopes of early releases and expectations of late AMD releases.. I just wouldn't bet money on either. How many release dates has AMD missed these last years ? How many did intel miss ?
One last point: I would not underestimate AMDs Turion offensive too much. They have made a big point out of reversing their priorities from desktop>notebook>server to server>notebook>desktop. We've seen what it has accomplished on the server side with Opteron, and I've always expected a similar attack on the mobile market once it got to 90nm. It got there now, and first products are looking extremely good with rather dramatic decrease in power consumption and/or clock potential, so now lets see what that will bring to the mobile front.
My bottom line: I firmly expect 90nm Turions to beat Dothan performance wise, have similar TDPs, but probably lower real life battery life. Likewise, I guess it will be very competitive performance wise with Yonah unplugged, take a beating on SMT code plugged in (until it goes dualcore on 65nm, some 6 months later) and be competitive in battery life. For many, it will be a choice between plugged in SMT performance and 64 bit abilities all other things being roughly comparable. And a dual core 65nm Turion may well end up being the better choice 12+ months from here.
= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =