AMD shows off dual-core Turion 64 in hotel room near IDF

Just like previous years AMD this year tried snooping away journalists from the Intel Developer Forum to show them some new AMD products in a nearby hotel room. I call this cheap and shady business practices but since its AMD nobody seems to care about it.

Anyway AMD today showed off a dual-core Turion 64. It wasn't integrated in a notebook yet but it used the new, smaller, Socket S1 with 638 pins and it is also the first publicly shown product from AMD with DDR2 memory. This is also the first CPU with Pacifica virtualization technology.

The company kept its lips shut about the price, clock speed and TDP of this chip but they did told the press it will be introduced in the first half of next year and that it will use significantly less power than the Athlon 64 X2. By the first half of 2006 AMD will also debut its desktop processors with Socket M2.

AMD also disclosed its 65nm process is working like a charm. They have already produced a few samples at Fab 36 but they aren't far enough to demonstrate them. Production of these chips will start next year but unfortunately the switch to 65nm won't mean lower power consumption for AMD. Intel's switch to 65nm promises a lot and the chip giant's next desktop processor generation will only use 65W, which is almost half of the current generation.

However, AMD hopes to decrease the power consumption of its processors in the long term. Maybe they will succeed with the help of IBM.

Source: Tweakers