Hacker News Reader

AMD's FX-8350 is a 32nm part. I don't know to what extent one company's 32nm process can be better than another, but but if there is a difference, I'd expect Intel to have the advantage. Given that the AMD part has 1.2B transistors on a 315mm^2 die and the Intel part has 1.16B transistors on a 216mm^2 die, I'd say the fabrication node isn't the whole story. (Even Intel's quad-core Sandy Bridge E part is 1.27B transistors in 284mm^2)

View on HN

>FX-8350 is a 32nm part.

My bad.

>AMD part has 1.2B transistors on a 315mm^2 die and the Intel part has 1.16B transistors on a 216mm^2 die

Yeah, I recently read somewhere that AMD significantly improved die area and power consumption of next FX cpu by using tools from graphics division. So it looks like the difference is not only in Intel's process advantage.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6201/amd-details-its-3rd-gen-s...

Two generations away, but eventually we'll be seeing AMD processors that are denser and thus cheaper, but with potentially lower clock speeds. I suspect Intel's got the resources to do a much better job of laying out a chip, but it's hard to say whether that's a process advantage or a chip design advantage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com