AMD’s 90nm AMD64 Chips to Deliver 5% Additional Performance?

by Anton Shilov
07/15/2004 | 04:04 PM

The new central processing units from Advanced Micro Devices are expected to deliver about 5% higher performance in certain tasks, if the early benchmarks of a new AMD Athlon 64 chips published by a web-site are correct.

AMD’s Upcoming Chips May be Faster than Today’s

According to a report at XtremeSystems.org web-site, the new AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processors made using 90nm fabrication process work about 5% faster than the same 3500+ chips produced using 130nm process technology in CPUMark99 benchmark. The benchmark measures CPU integer unit and data processing speeds. Another benchmark the web-site had posted, SiSoft’s Sandra, showcased that the forthcoming AMD64 chips are approximately as fast as the current offerings.

It is not clear which improvements have been made to the processing core, but earlier this week another web-site said the new AMD Athlon 64 would have some speed improvements compared to the current models. While AMD is now quiet about peculiarities of its 64-bit chips produced at thinner fabrication process, earlier this year representatives for the Sunnyvale, California-based chipmaker said that quite natural capabilities of future-generation Athlon 64 and Opteron microprocessors could be SSE3 technology, improved pre-fetch mechanisms as well as thermal throttling. AMD did not disclose any actual time-frames for this improvements to arrive.

AMD’s 90nm Transition On-Track

According to the recently unveiled roadmap, the Sunnyvale, California-based chipmaker plans to release a number of AMD Opteron processors code-named Athens, Troy and Venus, a Mobile Athlon 64 processor known as Oakville and a desktop Athlon 64 processor code-named Winchester produced using 90nm fabrication process in the second half of the year. The initial commercial shipments of AMD64 chips produced at 90nm nodes are officially said to commence in the third quarter of 2004.

In the first half of next year AMD will release the successor of its AMD Athlon 64 FX chip with core code-named San Diego along with a lineup of mobile microprocessors. In the second half of the year the company will release dual-core chips. AMD believes that the current AMD Athlon 64 FX microprocessor made using 130nm technology will be able to scale for at least one speed-bin required to compete successfully with the rival Intel Corp..

According to unofficial sources, AMD’s Athlon 64 FX-57 processor at 2.80GHz made using 90nm Silicon-on-Insulator process technology will be released in Q2 2005. A slightly slower AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 chip at 2.60GHz will be available in Q4 2004.

In the second half of next year AMD will initiate production of dual-core processors for various market segments using 90nm SOI process.

Representatives from Advanced Micro Devices said the company started shipments of samples products using 90nm process technology in Q2 2004 and is on track to begin volume commerical production of such devices in Q3 2004.

Officials for AMD did not comment on the news-story.