AMD's Atom rival is still based on the K8 architecture

FUD Zilla reports AMD's rival for the Intel Atom processor, codenamed Conesus, will be based on the aging K8 architecture, and will not be a 45nm but a 65nm chip. Conesus will be more advanced than the Intel Atom but it will have a much higher power consumption, which makes it less suitable for small, portable devices. The platform will have a sub-25W power consumption, which is considerable more than what current Intel Atom systems are using. The Intel Atom N270, 945GSE and ICH7M have a combined TDP of just 11.8W and future Atom platforms will consume even less.

Luckily for all of us, the K8 architecture is much more advanced than Atom, but Atom will always have uber-dominant sub 4W power consumtion, something that a K8 Athlon can only dream of. This is a 65nm CPU, not 45nm as we previously believed, and this dual-core will come with a total of 1MB L2 cache and DDR2 memory support. It will come in a BGA package, something that will fit nicely in ultraportable / mini notebook designs.

We’ve tested the latest energy efficient K8 Athlon, the 3400e here, and we’ve proved that this sub 25W part is faster than a single core Atom and this is the road that AMD wants to take. The way we understand AMD promised 25W TDP envelope is for chipset + CPU and since Conesus is dual-core, you can bet that Atom dual-cores for notebooks will launch in 2009.