Moving To 45-nm Will Be Easier For AMD
The problems AMD has been having with its Quad-Core Opteron Barcelona and desktop Phenom microprocessors has not stopped the company from forging ahead with its 45-nm development.
Barcelona and Phenom are 65-nm projects. However, development on 45-nm chips is underway, and AMD “will have initial samples also in January” (p. 2).
Test vehicles on 45 nanometers look good, so the samples should boot operating systems.
AMD moving to 45 nanometers will be easier because the bulk of the processor design will already be done this time.
AMD will mainly be porting the same basic Barcelona design to a new process with a few modifications here and there, much like Intel does when it moves to a new process.
By contrast, Barcelona was a much more ambitious project: moving to a new process and a new microprocessor design at the same time.
You can do one, or you can do the other, but it’s difficult to do both. Case in point, Barcelona.
That’s why Intel said that even they themselves would have had problems if they had tried to do what AMD did.
You can read the interview with AMD executive vice president Mario Rivas here.