yup, the revision F sure seems to bring a lot of improvements.

lowered Vcore and TDP, denser L2 cache, increased frequency potential, and ofcourse DDR2-800.
the Die size however is significantly increased, maybe for DDR2 controller and the Virtualisation tech.

lookin good AMD

Do you remember the price for the first Apple ? It was $666, which makes you wonder what Steve Jobs was thinking. Of course, volume back then was extremely low.

How I wish I were old enough to have that kind of money back then. I suspect a new one these days would be worth over $100,000 if it existed; the used ones sell for over $50,000. I do have a sealed Apple IIe though :P.

maybe the lower-power logic transistors occupy more space unlike the new cache transistors ...
Also you have to take into account the memcontroller(which got bigger) uses bigger transistors than other parts of the chip ...

Lazy,

It sort of makes sense, actually. Memory is the most efficient transistor in terms of transistors per area, so as it takes a smaller percentage of the whole, you would expect the physical size to increase at a higher rate then the number of transistors in the processor. If you get a chance, look at the percentage of transistors that are the caches, and then look at the portions of the processor make up the cache. You'll notice the percentage of transistors is greatly higher than the percentage of the area they take up.

I am with you in thinking that the size increase is kind of strange though, particularly considering the L2 cache got smaller in area. I don't believe this is all related to the memory controller, as I don't believe AMD was stupid enough to include support for DDR as well as DDR2. Of course, there could be things inherent to DDR2 that require more logic to support, but I don't know anything about this. It just seems strange for the size to increase so much, particularly when you consider how much companies hate this because it makes their processors more expensive to make.

Intel is already at DDR2 800Mhz with their last chipset, so it makes sense to support it, or the platform would look inferior.

I'm very interested in seeing the difference in performance differences with DDR2 533, 667 and 800.

You can't be serious Kaz.

?!?!?!

They would never release the processor at just DDR2 667, because Intel is already at DDR2 800 with their latest chipset.

AMD by supporting up to DDR2 667Mhz memory would make their platform look inferior.