AMD releases details of 90 nm Opterons, multicore chips

Westlake Village (CA) - AMD quietly published first specs of the first 90 nm Opteron processors and talked about Opterons with up to eight cores during a conference with analysts.

First details of the next generation workstation and server processor recently appeared in AMD's "Quick Reference Guide". While AMD was not available for comment on the listing and availability of four not yet announced processors with D4 stepping, the spec sheet provides technical details and differences in comparison to the current 130 nm models.

All 90 nm processors reduce thermal design power from 89 Watts to 67 Watts, core voltage drops from 1.5 Volts to 1.4 Volts. The case temperature of the chips drops from 70 to 65 degrees Celsius, support for Socket 940 and integration of 1 MByte L2 cache remains unchanged.

The new series includes the single-system Opteron 146 with a clock speed of 2.0 GHz, the dual-system version 246 (2.0 GHz), the dual-system 248 (2.2 GHz) as well as the four and eight-way version 846 (2.0 GHz).

AMD's chief technology officer Fred Weber used an analyst conference to provide updates on the firm's dual-core strategy. After Intel has stepped up significantly its pace of communicating the importance of dual and multicore processors to increase chip performance, Weber said that AMD will introduce server-targeted dual-core Opterons by mid of 2005. The company also plans processors with up to eight cores, he said.