On Friday we posted a cautiously optimistic quick look at Athlon 64 thermals, but stated we were going to return for a more in-depth appraisal.  The delay (and split article) was caused by hardware compatibility issues that had us swapping motherboards three times in order to find a board that supported both chips in BIOS and didn?t have any voltage issues (our A8V beta BIOS supported both, but insisted on running the 90nm Winchester at 1.60v.  As you can imagine, this is a less-than-healthy voltage for our 90nm part. We’ve spent more time looking into the chip across a variety of speeds using the MSI Neo2, and would like to share the results. 

Before we discuss our findings, lets talk a bit more about the 90nm problem in general.  Because my own background in electricity and physics is lacking, I?ve kept the discussion high-level?if you feel you?ve got something to add, feel free to email me. 

Intel?s Prescott Headache first sign of 90nm Trouble.

As we stated in our earlier article, general public expectation was that Prescott would offer improvement to Northwood in the same manner that Northwood improved on Willamette.  Even though Prescott was known to have architectural features that made it less-efficient than Northwood, those features were explained as being compromises that would, in the long run, allow for a higher-scaling CPU. 

When Prescott arrived and proved to be both slower than Northwood in most tests and much hotter we hypothesized that Intel might re-spin the silicon and release a cooler-running part, similar to how AMD did with the Thoroughbred-core Athlon. Nine months later, this is looking less-and-less likely.  LGA775 offered no cooling benefit beyond the better heatsink / fan combo, and there?s no reason to think Intel has a new die revision coming that will drastically change Prescott?s thermal signature.

Its still not clear how much of Prescott?s thermal trouble is unique to the processor and how much is caused by Intel?s 90nm process, but the months since Prescott?s launch have proven the problem to be much bigger than Intel.  IBM?s much-touted G5 shipped months late on 90nm and forced Apple to simultaneously delay the iMac and use water-cooling to push the CPU up to 2.5 GHz. 

next >

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• Anatomy of a Die Shrink. (1 of 5)
• Motherboard Thermal Measuring (2 of 5)
• The Athlon 64 3200+: Courtesey of Monarch, Idle Temps. (3 of 5)
• Athlon 64 Load Temperatures: (4 of 5)
• Using dual cores to dodge high-frequency problems, Conclusion. (5 of 5)