Beware of fake 65 nanometre advertising

WHEN I FILED a story last weekend which disclosed the alleged availability of AMD's 65nm CPUs, my ground for the story was a positive search for Brisbane dual core 65nanometre chip in search engines PreisTrend and Geizhals. A lot of stores were advertising that they sold single and dual-core AMD Athlon 64 manufactured using the 65 nanometre process.

Even if you go to those sites today and do a search for Brisbane cores, you will again get positive results and find dozens of Brisbane products. However, other stores have now changed the manufacturing process from "0.06" and "65" to "0.09" and "90", but still keeping the Brisbane codename.

A store in the original story had three different SKUs (stock keeping units) on several Athlon offerings: two were 90nm SOI Windsor cores in tray and retail packaging, and a "new" 65nm in tray variant alone. Since 65 nanometre Opterons appeared on Ebay on Friday as well, yours truly concluded that the 65nm will hit the stores next week. We also talked to Richard Baker, AMD's channel manager for EMEA, and in the conversation we touched on the 65nm CPU availability. The answer was not precise, but 65nm CPU availability was commented as "will begin shortly".

Regardless of the advertising done by German and Austrian e-stores, we learned that 65 nanometre wafers are currently in manufacturing, and you can expect availability in the next couple of weeks. µ