Spezifikationen / Technische Details

The chip with 45 nanometer structures is being manufactured, using the so called immersion lithography process. Therefore AMD/IBM are using light with a wavelanght of 193 nm. The difference to the usual process is that between lense and laser there now isn't air anymore instead they use water which has a different different index of refraction. This affects the precision in a positive way and they are able to develop smaller structures.
Since the K8 core AMD also produces its CPUs with SOI, Silicon on Insulator.

On the DIE-plot below you can clearly recognize the 6 MByte big L3-Cache which has now tripled and takes nearly to complete right part of the picture. Left of it you find the four cores with its 512 KByte L2-Cache as well as 64 + 64 KByte L1-Cache which they can access. The L3-Cache also uses a special technique to save power: smart-fetch. This allows the L3-Cache to directly access data from the L1- or L2-Cache. Therefore the L1- and L2-Cache can be put to sleep.

A further and important improvement are the overworked energy saving features Cool and Quiet as well as C1E. If you activated them with a Phenom processor you lost between 10 to 15 percent of performance by saving 25 percent of energy. With the Phenom II you'll only lose one to twoo percent performance but still the energy consumption will decrease by 25 percent. Therefore we can now also recommend to use AMDs energy saving features.