AMD to focus on Turion brand for 65nm mobile CPUs?

Only 90nm Mobile Athlon 64 X2s, it seems

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

7th April 2006 10:52 GMT

Don't expect AMD to offer a 65nm Mobile Athlon 64 X2 processor. According to alleged Turion roadmap details, the dual-core Mobile Athlon 64s will only be fabricated using a 90nm process, for the foreseeable future at least. AMD's 65nm mobile parts are due Q1 2007.

Roadmap slides published by Chinese-language website HKEPC, the 65nm mobile cores 'Tyler' and 'Sherman' are linked only to the Turion 64 X2 and Mobile Sempron families, respectively. The Mobile Athlon 64 X2 line isn't mentioned in connection with these so-called 'Revision G' processors, only with 'Revision F', the 90nm core that forms the basis for 'Taylor', 'Keene' and 'Trinidad'.

As we've reported before, Trinidad is the Socket S1, 800MHz DDR 2 SDRAM-supporting chip that will be used for future dual-core Mobile Athlon 64s. It has 512KB of L2 cache per core. Keene is the Sempron version, a single-core part with 128KB or 256KB of cache. Taylor will ship in 256KB and 512KB L2 cache versions as the long-awaited dual-core Turion 64 X2.

All three versions are expected to be announced in June, though at this stage we can't rule out a May introduction.

With no 65nm Mobile Athlon 64 X2 on the cards, there's no Socket 940 support in Revision G. Aside from the shift to 65nm and one other point, Revision G matches the Revision F spec. Unlike Revision F, Revision G chips will be separated by 100MHz clock speed intervals instead of the 200MHz divisions AMD has used to date. ®