Spica the devil: AMD engages dilithium crystals

AMD HAS moved from the cities to the stars in a future desktop processor roadmap seen by the INQ.

In place of humdrum earthly cities like Windsor, Orleans, Brisbane and Manila, desktop chips at 45 nanometres slated for the second half of 2008 are named after some stars with interesting backgrounds.

Deneb FX, a quad core chip with shared L3 cache, HT3 and coming in 1207+ and AM2+/AM3 packages is named after a star in the tail of Capricorn.

Propus, a dual core chip, has similar characteristics to Deneb but is situated in the foot of Castor in the constellation of Gemini.

Regor is also a dual core chip, coming in AM2+/AM3 packages and supporting DDR2/3 and HT3.0. It's a 1.78 magnitude blue star that's 520 light years away from Sunnyvale, in the constellation of The Ship's Sails.

And Sargas, a single core chip, is the third brightest star in the constellation of the Scorpion.

It is somewhat worrying that AMD won't have these 45 nanometre chips out until the second half of 2008, by which time we presume Intel will already be churning its 45 nano offerings.

In the first half of next year, AMD is promising the Rana dual core and the Spica single core, both at 65 nanometres. Spica is 262 light years away and is of course famous for being the head of the ear of grain held by Virgo.

Code names based on stars is an interesting concept but we suspect AMD is hoping their arrival won't be light years away. According to Mark Osborne at Fabtech, Intel will put four factories into gear for its 45 nanometre chips in order to obtain decent yields. AMD does not have that luxury. µ

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AMD's roadmap is in a terrible muddle