AMD gets 65 nano chips out in 2006 - just

AMD IS LAUNCHING its very delayed 65 nanometre products today. There are few surprises to the announcement but AMD has only just managed to get them out before 2006 ended.

Apparently AMD is attempting to retain what it believes is numbering sanity, although you'd be forgiven for thinking it's caught the same disease Intel has. All 65 nanometre products will have a 65 watt TDP and since all of the first gen products are so called X2s, you're on your own figuring it out. Single core parts will arrive in 2007 as part of AMD's "ramp".

AMD will halve clock dividers, that's 100MHz steps for you non-technical types out there. This means you will see a 2.6GHz 5000+, a 4800+ at 2.5GHz, 4400+ at 2.3GHz and a lonely 4000+ at 2.1GHz. There is no good explanation for the lack of 2.4GHz and 2.2GHz products, maybe it is sunspots or a German holiday that I am unaware of. The chips are priced at $301, $271, $214 and $169 respectively. If you are buying them in 1000s and in trays, so you have to be a tier one OEM.

A few more bits are not in the "official presentations", that is size and yield. It looks like AMD is going to "shrink the die" from the 183 mm^2 or so they are at now for the 512K cache parts to somewhere around the 12x mm^2 mark. Also, we are instructed that the introduction at mature yields talk they give means that the number of good chips they get off a 65 nanometre wafer exceeds that of a 90 nanometre wafer.

Since both are built on 12 inch wafers, or 300mm as this size is called in Europe, the 33% or so shrink means that AMD will get lower yield as a percentage of dice but it is a net gain in terms of compontents.

Basically, this means capacity is going up, and it will ease shortage problems or it will mean overcapacity, depending a lot on what the market does. In any case, as things ramp, capacity may increase notably.

We will close with two more numbers. In Q1 or so, AMD will cross over from 90nm to a majority 65nm production. For the pedantic, this means that the 65nm wafers out are more than half of production. Full conversion will happen in late 2007. There you have it, the happy world of AMD 65nm. µ