Yonah article here on Anandtech

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: IntelUser2000

Dothan could have easily scaled higher than it did at 90nm, the desktop Athlon chips were pushing their limits at 130nm.

No, and overclocking results aren't an indication, since its a laptop chip. Take a look at here: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=1800&p=7

In the course of designing a processor, you will eventually discover that there are certain speed paths in your CPU that will run either faster or slower than your target clock speed. If you run into paths that run slower than your target clock speed, you're in trouble, since it means that you won't be able to reach the clocks you were hoping to without some sort of a redesign. In most cases, if you find that a path is running faster than your target clock speed (e.g. finding a path capable of running at 2.4GHz on a chip with a 1.6GHz target clock speed) then you're in a very good situation, as it means that there are parts of your chip that have fairly high ceilings. For the Israel design team however, this wasn't the case.

The design team actually went in and slowed down paths that were running above Banias' target clock frequencies, because if a path is able to run faster than it should, it means that you're wasting power. The benefit of this is an even more power efficient microprocessor, but the downside is a microprocessor that has a clear clock frequency wall.

2.6GHz won't count. As 2.8GHz with Athlon 64 FX tells what it could reach with single core. Athlon 64 FXs are clocked higher to differentiate from the Athlon 64 cause at same clock speed FXs aren't any faster than 64's.

The difference is that Dothan=laptop chip specially made so it doesn't really clock high, rather low power consumption is a bigger priority, while A64's are desktop chips and can't really care about power consumption as long as they are not a frypan.


Actually Yonah and X2's are same since Yonah will clock similar to Dothan and X2's will EVENTUALLY clock same to 64's.

The FX is not the same as any old Athlon 64 though, it's a handpicked/produced chip. Typically, revisions of a chip (as far as a clock speed limitation or how advanced the memory controller is) hit the FX first, if there ever is an Athlon 64 released using that specific core. The closest Dothan has to this are the low voltage and ultra low voltage chip, which are binned for low power consumption and not the highest possible mhz.
I'm pretty sure there was no 130nm 2.6ghz athlon 64, it was a very low volume chip, just like not every dothan can do 1 ghz while consuming less than 1 watt. Yonah is only hitting the speeds Dothan was at because there never was a focus to push Dothan's clock speed as high as possible.

 

[larciel]

so since intel is catching up with AMD cpu brute performance, what's the next weapon from AMD ? (other than the mysterious M2 socket change? ) do we have K9 coming up?