AMD Brisbane

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AMD has consistently touted its model of continuous improvement for chip fabrication techniques, and that model has served it well in the recent past. The products of a well-refined 90nm process have more or less held their own on power efficiency against 65nm processors from Intel, except for at the very high end. Chips produced with AMD's special low-power 90nm process tweaks, like the Energy Efficient 3800+ and 4600+ we tested, have been especially impressive. The flip side of that coin is that AMD's move from 90nm to 65nm does not instantly produce huge improvements in energy efficiency or clock frequency headroom. Instead, the 65nm transition brings a welcome but incremental improvement in power consumption over current Athlon 64 X2 products and little or no additional headroom. If you're looking to by an Athlon 64 X2, then I'd definitely try to grab the 65nm version, but don't expect miracles from it.

AMD will no doubt continue its trajectory of gradual improvement to its process tech, leading to additional power savings and headroom at 65nm in the future. For now, though, making it over this hurdle isn't nearly enough to overcome the sizeable performance gap between the Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 X2—and it does very little to counter the formidable presence of Intel's quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700, which is coming in lower-power, lower-cost Core 2 Quad form soon.

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Updated: AMD has given us the official confirmation that L2 cache latencies have increased, and that it purposefully did so in order to allow for the possibility of moving to larger cache sizes in future parts. AMD stressed that this wasn't a pre-announcement of larger cache parts to come, but rather a preparation should the need be there to move to a vastly larger L2. Thankfully the performance delta isn't huge, at least in the benchmarks that we saw, so AMD's decision isn't too painful - especially as it comes with the benefit of a cooler running core that draws less power; ideally we'd like the best of all worlds but we'll take what we can get. Note that none of AMD's current roadmaps show any larger L2 parts (other than the usual 2x1MB offerings), which tells us one of two things: either AMD has some larger L2 parts that it's planning on releasing or AMD is being completely honest with the public in saying that the larger L2 parts will only be released if necessary.