Phenom 9500 w/ MSI K9A2 Platinum

[JumpingJack]

Now that shows nothing really. What can you expect from ITSA 45nm?
First of all, far lower wiring delay and power leakage due to Ultralow-k use, more than that of Intel 45nm, and secondly, IBM/AMD already presented their experimental findings of the highest PMOS (110) transistor performance with only using conventional SiON + compressive liner and eSiGe stressors with optimized Rext. at Lgate=35nm, Vdd=1.0V, 250 nm poly-pitch: Ion over 1 mA/μm at Ioff 100 nA/μm. AFAIK the concentration of pFET Germanium was <30&#37; and SiC was used for nFET performance advancements. This was back in September 2007, so quite obviously with HK/MG, even with metal gate-first approach, they are not going to be much behind Intel 45nm on pure transistor perf., if not quite ahead judging by their research experimental data we have from them.

KTE,

The ULK will have a positive power impact, but dynamic not leakage. Leakage in the backend is not the dominating power loss mechansims, gate leakage has surpassed subthreshold leakage at 65 nm.

On the Idsat, it will be interesting if AMD can implement the (110) technology since that will be a big boost in Pmos, they have not reported Pmos data that I am aware, though I have only 'lazily' looke dor it.

Their NMOS Idsat is not that impressive, they are reporting 1364 at 200 is about 8% above where they reported the initial 65 nm at the same subthreshold and this does not account for gate leakage which is only present during the on state. So, unless PMOS comes in very strong, then 8-10% more clock at the same thermals, or some power savings at the same clock.

It is hard to tell, or even speculate at this point since the initial 65 nm data is sorta stale, in that what AMD reported in 2005 was probably operative at 65 nm launch (which top binned at 2.6 GHz for a dual core at the time), but today that is pretty much different for what is going into Barcelona since they had a year to exercise CTI.

In short, I don't really see AMD's 45 nm really coming very close to Intels unless two things happen... they bring in HK/MG and come out with a very strong PMOS (which could happen if they do 110)

EDIT: I went and looked up the IEDM paper referenced in your link http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freea...t=281&index=75 (oooops, not that one, this one http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freea...t=281&index=78) and yep, their Ion/Ioff curve is very impressive.


Jack