Feature Articles

Sustaining Moore's Law - 10 Years of the CPU

By Vincent Chang - 29 Dec 2008

Timeline: 2007

2007

Following a year where its competitiveness was seriously eroded by Intel's Core micro-architecture, all eyes were on AMD and its upcoming K10 micro-architecture. But before that was to be released, Intel's new 'tick-tock' strategy was illustrated when the company showed off its 45nm Penryn processors, which effectively shrinks the Core 2 from 65nm to 45nm, together with an increase in cache size and naturally greater energy savings. Needless to say, we were quite excited by Intel's upcoming processors, especially as they involved a "new high-K dielectric and metal gate transistor design". In fact, we did not have to wait till 2008 as predicted to see our first 45nm processor, as Intel delivered a Core 2 Extreme QX9650 in October, right before AMD's scheduled launch of its new K10 micro-architecture. These new quad-core can be considered only "a minor 'refresh' to the year-old Conroe core from 65nm to 45nm" but it was indicative of the strong position that Intel had in manufacturing and process technologies. AMD needed a perfect launch of its K10 architecture to have any hopes of staging a comeback.

Unfortunately, AMD's 'Barcelona' cores that formed the basis of the K10 micro-architecture did not appear to be the answer. The Opteron versions of the new micro-architecture were only launched in September and while these were indeed the native quad-core processors that we had been promised, the new cores were hardly the answer against Intel's latest in both performance and power efficiency. Our verdict then was "what it did was to bring itself forward to better compete with Intel. Unfortunately as the results showed, it wasn't quite as effective as we hoped it would be." The Barcelona was not without its strengths, especially when it involved the memory subsystem but Intel was overall still the leader to beat for the important areas.

More trouble was to follow for AMD. When the desktop versions, the Phenom X4 was released in November, it was found to have a TLB bug that affected its stability in certain scenarios. AMD hemmed and hawed about the issue before releasing a BIOS fix that was found to affect the performance of the processors by around 10%. Eventually, the company would go back and re-release a new B3 stepping of the Phenom X4 that was bug-free. This naturally affected our review of the Phenom X4 and we would finally publish the results months later, when the B3 steppings were at last available in March 2008.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.