AMD's 65nm Brisbane Core Previewed: The most energy efficient AMD CPU to date
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 14, 2006 6:08 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Temperature, Overclocking and Final Words
Lower power consumption and cooler operation are both positive side effects of AMD's new 65nm process, the latter of which is exemplified by the graph below:
What we're looking at here is the core temperature of the 2nd core in all of the CPUs, under full load, as reported by Core Temp. While it's not necessarily useful (or accurate) to compare readings across two different motherboards, as is the case when looking at AMD vs. Intel, the comparisons between AMD chips alone are enough to showcase the reduction in temperature.
With both cores under load for 15 minutes (calculating Fast Fourier Transforms) the 65nm 5000+ manages to produce just about as much heat as the X2 3800+ EE SFF. While this won't always be the case, it gives you an idea of the reduction in temperatures you can expect from AMD's new 65nm chips.
What about overclockability? We were unfortunately not able to get that much more out of the new 65nm core as we could from mature 90nm chips. Our X2 5000+ was able to run at 2.925GHz, at 1.475V with stock air cooling. If equipped with better air cooling or something more exotic, reaching over 3GHz shouldn't be a problem, but we wouldn't expect to see anything too far over 3GHz.
Overall we're left with mixed feelings after playing with AMD's first 65nm chips. Power consumption is definitely reduced compared to its 90nm offerings; in our tests we saw an average reduction in total system power consumption of 14.6W thanks to the new Brisbane core. Along with the lower power draw comes lower temperatures, which is also good. For no additional cost, and given that it should help alleviate AMD's capacity constraints thanks to a smaller die, there's nothing to complain about on that front.
However we would like to see more, and we have a feeling that it may end up being the 2nd rev of 65nm CPUs from AMD that truly interest us. Just as we saw with AMD's 90nm cores, it wouldn't be too surprising to see lower TDP parts emerge as AMD's process matures. We do hope to see an Energy Efficient line of X2s built on AMD's 65nm process, although it may take some time for AMD's manufacturing to reach the point where it can offer significantly reduced TDP 65nm parts.
The tweaks and advancements that AMD can do to make its 65nm parts more attractive can only go so far; while they will boast lower power consumption and improve production numbers for AMD, what we really need is a long overdue update to the K8 architecture. AMD has already promised it and we're expecting big things by the middle of next year, but in the mean time at least things will be a little cooler on the green side.
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Tilmitt - Thursday, December 14, 2006 - link
This "Performance per Watt" marketing bullshit has gone too far. Strange how Anandtech only started including it when Intel started marketing it insanely.To hell with performance per watt, give me performance.
Mantruch - Tuesday, December 19, 2006 - link
Indeed.. who give a sh*t about watt/performance, this is a desktop cpu not mobile...who sold this article to amd ? lol
Locutus465 - Saturday, December 16, 2006 - link
No... This was one of the major topics of discussion in the A64 v. P4 days as well, only AMD was enjoying Intel's current position. So Intel has a better chip right now, whats the big deal? This is why we like compitition.
Genx87 - Friday, December 15, 2006 - link
We didnt use to care about performance\watt in the consumer sector and left that to the professional arena. But ever since the power draw and heat of the consumer boxes started to rival professional level boxes it is good to see what you are getting.Gone are the days of a 250 watt PSU and a system that is passively cooled.
Frumious1 - Thursday, December 14, 2006 - link
Seems to me performance per watt is AMD's only leg to stand on right now (unless you just want to go with pure power draw). If you just look at performance AMD is even farther behind and that won't change until we see K8L, and maybe even that won't be enough. It's good to see lower temps and power requirements from AMD as it shows they're at least doing something other than sitting around bemoaning their fate. Intel already wins the marketing war, and now they're killing AMD on performance as well.Would have liked to see more CPUs for the comparison, though - like how about a 65nm 4600+ and 3800+ to see how they match up with the EE/EE SFF chips? Getting an E6300/6400 in as well would ahve been nice. Last, the use of an 8800 GTX is going to skew the "performance per watt" numbers, but it should still be consistent in this one set of benchmarks. As long as we don't get comparisons using other GPUs thrown in, it's probably the best you can do. Still would be nice to know how much power the CPU is really drawing on all these tests - probably less than 50W would be my bet.
yyrkoon - Thursday, December 14, 2006 - link
Intel won WHAT marketing war ? More like they won a battle, after losing many to their competitor, for around two years. Also, unless something has changed recently that I'm unaware of, AMD also leads in memory bandwidth, not that THAT much memory bandwidth translates into real world performance.I don't know which platform you like, and to be honest, I don't really care. However it would behoove us all, to realize that AMD, and Intel are both good companies, and if one were to go missing, we ALL would be in a much worse "market".
Frumious1 - Friday, December 15, 2006 - link
Right now, I prefer Intel. Oddly enough, though, I'm still running AMD Opteron 165 overclocked to 2.6 GHz, because it's fast enough. Better? Nope, but good enough. So I preferred AMD when they were ahead.My point about marketing is that Intel has always had the lead there - ALWAYS! How many AMD commercials do you see? A few, maybe. Intel floods the airwaves with adverts. Being better at marketing doesn't make your products superior, but if you own the mindshare of the common man it can make it damn hard for others to compete. Hell, with the junk that was Prescott (and the later NetBurst stuff), the fact that most corporations were still buying Intel says something, doesn't it? Yes, AMD made a lot of gains, but with Intel back in the lead those gains are eroding fast.
I for one hope K8L kicks some serious ass. HOPE. I remain unconvinced that AMD can close the gap and then some in the next 6 months. We shall see. Let's just hope it's not more of this Quad FX craziness. If I wanted two dual core AMD CPUs, I think I probably would have bought an Opteron 2xx setup a while back. Unbuffered RAM might improve performance a bit (5% or so?) but not enough to matter. As for octal core systems (dual quad core), don't make me laugh. That's great for the server market, and maybe even high end workstations, but on the desktop we're years away from being able to utilize/need that much CPU power.
Frumious1 - Friday, December 15, 2006 - link
Well, better a double post than to lose all that I typed. It looked like the post didn't go through, I luckily had it copied first, and after three refreshes I posted again. Naturally at that point both posts show up.yyrkoon - Saturday, December 16, 2006 - link
I don't know what current Intel CPUs memory bandwidth is, but at the time I checked my AM2 3800+ (single core) the closest thing was a core 2 duo at around 8-10GB/s bandwidth. After dropping the multiplier on my AM2 CPU, and increasing the "FSB" to 250MHZ, memory bandwidth on my 3800+ AM2 was over 11GB/s. I didn't test before hand, well maybe I did, but I don't recall what it was, so . . . I may have posted somewhere on the anandtech forums. Anyhow, I'm pretty sure its much more than 5% differences between the two, but like I said, it does not translate into real world performance, so it's pretty much moot.Frumious1 - Friday, December 15, 2006 - link
Right now, I prefer Intel. Oddly enough, though, I'm still running AMD Opteron 165 overclocked to 2.6 GHz, because it's fast enough. Better? Nope, but good enough. So I preferred AMD when they were ahead.My point about marketing is that Intel has always had the lead there - ALWAYS! How many AMD commercials do you see? A few, maybe. Intel floods the airwaves with adverts. Being better at marketing doesn't make your products superior, but if you own the mindshare of the common man it can make it damn hard for others to compete. Hell, with the junk that was Prescott (and the later NetBurst stuff), the fact that most corporations were still buying Intel says something, doesn't it? Yes, AMD made a lot of gains, but with Intel back in the lead those gains are eroding fast.
I for one hope K8L kicks some serious ass. HOPE. I remain unconvinced that AMD can close the gap and then some in the next 6 months. We shall see. Let's just hope it's not more of this Quad FX craziness. If I wanted two dual core AMD CPUs, I think I probably would have bought an Opteron 2xx setup a while back. Unbuffered RAM might improve performance a bit (5% or so?) but not enough to matter. As for octal core systems (dual quad core), don't make me laugh. That's great for the server market, and maybe even high end workstations, but on the desktop we're years away from being able to utilize/need that much CPU power.