TechReport publishes Scott Wasson’s review of AMD Penon II processors’ performance compared to that of Intel Core2 line and Core i7 line processors.
“The big changes with the Phenom II come in the chip itself, and those changes start with the conversion to a 45nm fabrication process. Because the basic building blocks are smaller than the 65nm process used to build the original Phenom, the Phenom II can pack more transistors into a smaller space while drawing less power and, potentially, operating at higher clock speeds. Intel has been at the 45nm process node for quite a while. AMD may seem a little late to the game, but the underdog brings its own particular spin by employing silicon-on-insulator technology and a brand-new technique called immersion lithography, in which a layer of water is used to focus light.”
“If you’re wondering where the Phenom II’s additional transistors come from, look no further than its L3 cache, which has grown in size from 2MB to 6MB. This larger L3 cache is the centerpiece of AMD’s effort to improve the clock-for-clock performance of its quad-core processor architecture. This cache isn’t just larger, though. It’s also faster, with what AMD claims is a two-cycle improvement in access latencies versus the 65nm Phenom’s L3 cache. Since the L3 cache in this architecture runs at a lower clock frequency than the CPU cores themselves, the improvement in access times may be more substantial than this claim might first seem to suggest. The cache hierarchy is smarter in various ways, too, with more aggressive data prefetch algorithms, twice the bandwidth for L1/L2 coherency probes, and 48-way set associativity for the L3 cache. AMD has made quite a few changes to improve per-clock performance. If you’d like to read about them in more detail, I suggest checking out my review of the 45nm Opterons, which discusses this same silicon in more depth. ”
