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AMD's New 45nm Processors Register 12% Power Efficiency

The 45nm Deneb has greater cache, but lower temperature and smaller power consumption

Jul 25, 2008 08:58 GMT  ·  By
  

AMD announced a few days ago that the transition to the 45nm process technology is moving as planned, and that we would have the first microprocessors developed under the new fabrication process by the end of the year. It seems that the company is now getting the latest details of the move ready. Also, the first processor manufactured under the 45nm technology should be based on the Deneb quad-core, the rumors say.

Benchmarking and overclocking tests of this processor were made quite a while ago, and now we see that more engineering samples get to those that have access to the black market. The new tests conducted on the processor are focused more on the power consumption, and the results seem to be impressive enough.

Tests run by the guys from itocp made a comparison with the 65nm Phenom 9600 processor, showing that the 45nm Deneb processor uses 12% less power on an identical system. The core frequency of both processors is 2.3GHz. The energy gain is visible both in the idle and loaded state of the processors. Also, the 45nm processor registered a lower temperature level than its 65nm brother.

When idling, the Deneb system needed 147W while the 65nm went to 154W. The power consumption of the Deneb heightened to 176W during load, compared to the 65nm which packed 200W. As for temperature, although it has a greater cache, the 45nm Deneb processor registered an 8 degrees lower one than the 65nm Phenom.

The 45nm processor seems to have almost the same architecture as the 65nm does, but the difference should be in the number of transistors. Especially as three of the caches have been spotted to be higher, namely 6MB. As three of the caches will be addressed faster, this can be considered as a great achievement over today's quad cores.

No other specific characteristics of the new 45nm processors have been showed, but that will certainly change as soon as AMD has them officially sent for testing and previews. Those willing to see pictures of the Deneb processor and get more info on the testing should go to itocp.