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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (198142)	5/20/2006 5:40:36 PM
From: eracer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: Can someone explain to me how this Conroe (Cornholio) has suddenly become the holy grail? How did they design a chip that is so much faster than an Athlon and runs on less juice? Pentium-M was designed as an energy-efficient mobile CPU from the ground up. Conroe, Merom and Woodcrest expand on that theme. The move to 65-nm helps Intel on frequency and power consumption. AMD should be able to catch up on energy-efficiency at 65-nm assuming the process is healthy and the architecture is sound. Netburst was the future. It died. Intel had a back-up plan with Pentium-M. AMD's future was K9 and K10. They died as well, apparently. I assume AMD's back-up plan is K8L. Conroe/Merom/Woodcrest performance has not been a secret. Articles from over two years ago were talking about big performance increases. theinquirer.net

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (198142)	5/20/2006 5:49:42 PM
From: mas_	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Firstly it's based on the P-M architecture so it's low-power to start with. They added AMD64 and added a big 4 MB shared L2 cache which is probably twice as effective as a 1 MB cache in term of reducing cache missrate meaning that a Conroe would have to go to memory only half as much as an Opteron in single-thread mode. Finally they beefed up execution units so that it processes 4 x86 instructions per cycle as opposed to the 3 of K8/P4. That's the short answer, these will give you a longer answer ;-) anandtech.com realworldtech.com