Quote Originally Posted by informal View Post
There are reports that some ATi people are to be "blamed" () for this kind of shift in marketing and product strategy.It seems it's working,so kudos to them
those reports about shift in marketing are true, but real address for kudos is Dresden design center and AMD-IBM team in Fishkill

Don't remember who posted this explanation about AMD's 65nm doldroms (maybe Hans)

http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/sho...printable=true

But with 45nm tech things are complitely different, and AMD/IBM team has done some amazing job with their imersion 45nm tech, that yield all these goodies (lack of coldbug, high voltage tolerance, high clocks...)

You can read all about it here: http://www.eetimes.eu/semi/showArtic...printable=true

this part is most significant:

The new design of the PFET moves the embedded silicon-germanium source/drain regions closer to the channel to maximize the transfer of stress, thereby increasing hole mobility. Although shorter gate lengths are not driving the improvements, it is a reduction in dimensions that allows increased channel stress to provide the performance scaling. AMD 45-nm PFET design reduces the space from embedded silicon-germanium to the channel edge by half.

The transistor drive current for AMD's 45-nm devices is much lower than that of the Intel HKMG transistors. But power consumption is quickly becoming a high priority for server chips. AMD's transistors exhibit very low channel leakage.

Our transistor benchmarks indicates that leakage current is less than one-third of the value measured on AMD's 65-nm process. It's also significantly lower than the Intel 45-nm HKMG process. In fact the Ion/Ioff ratio for AMD's PFET is nearly 10 times better than that for the Intel PFET.


oh when I remember some comments on this forum that SOI is doomed with coldbug for eternety, and that is unable to produce any benefits beyond 90nm tech