AMD shrinks desktop chips to 65-nm design

By manufacturing its dual-core Athlon 64 X2 chip on the smaller geometry, AMD will be able to increase manufacturing output while improving the chips' performance and power efficiency, said Jack Huynh, a market development manager for AMD.

Some PC vendors are selling the new chip in computers already, and by the first quarter of 2007 that list will include Acer Inc., Dell Inc., Founder Electronics Co. Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Co., Packard Bell BV and Tsinghua Tongfang Co. Ltd., according to AMD.

The move to 65-nm manufacturing is crucial for AMD as the company strives to keep up with a flurry of new processors from Intel. Intel had a rough year in 2006, losing ground to AMD in market share, but has rallied in recent months. The company launched its Core 2 Duo family of desktop chips in July and its quad-core Core 2 Extreme in November. Intel switched its chip manufacturing plants to a smaller architecture months ago, and already sells more 65-nm chips than 90-nm chips.

A chip made with 65-nm process technology has smaller features -- such as transistors and the wires that connect them -- than a chip made with 90-nm technology, said Rob Willoner, a technology analyst with Intel's technology and manufacturing group. That progression is the engine that drives Moore's Law, the prediction that the number of processors on a microprocessor will double every 18 months.

One nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, meaning that the wires on 65-nm design chips are far slimmer than human hairs. Minuscule as that is, chip vendors already have plans to shrink the parts even smaller. Intel has already announced plans to use chip features of 45 nm by 2007, 32 nm by 2009 and 22 nm by 2011.

As chip features continue to shrink, engineers struggle harder to take each new step. But as long as customers demand smaller, more efficient computers, there's plenty of economic incentive for the process to continue, he said.

"There's bound to be an end at some point, but we can't see it yet," Willoner said. "At one point, people said it was 1 micron, which is 1,000 nm, but the industry passed that without blinking about a decade ago. Now some people are saying it's 5 nm. I don't see it happening before 2020 or 2025, and by then we could have radically different technologies to compensate."

AMD chose to apply the new "Rev G" 65-nm design to its high-end, dual-core desktop chip first because the company's midrange, single-core Athlon and Sempron chips are already fairly efficient, running at 62 watts using a 90-nm design, said AMD's Huynh.

The Athlon 64 X2 operated at a high 110 watts when it was first launched in June 2005, but this migration will bring it down to just 65 watts, he said. AMD will continue to produce both 90-nm and 65-nm Athlon 64 X2 chips until it phases the larger-design chips out completely by the second half of 2007.

Next, AMD plans to apply the 65-nm design to its single-core Athlon and Sempron chips, shrinking them by the end of 2007. And the company has already begun work on the next step, shrinking its chips to a 45-nm design, although AMD did not give a specific date for that goal.

AMD is selling the 65-nm Athlon 64 X2 chips at prices of US$301 for a 2.6GHz 5000-series chip, $271 for the 2.5GHz 4800 series, $214 for the 2.3GHz 4400 series, and $169 for the 2.1GHz 4000 series, all priced in lots of 1,000.