For ages, moving to a smaller fab process has been the key to achieving lower power consumption and higher clock speeds, but the 90nm process hasn"t worked out that way, at least for Intel. After watching Intel"s struggles with its rather hot and power-hungry 90nm Pentium 4 "Prescott" processors, we"ve been waiting with some trepidation to see whether AMD"s new 90nm chips would have similar problems.
We were finally able to get our hands on a 90nm Athlon 64 3500+ this past weekend, and we"ve been testing it to see how it compares to the 130nm version. Since this 90nm Athlon 64 3500+ runs at the same clock speed as the 130nm Athlon 64 3500+, we were able to do a direct comparison between the chips running at 2.2GHz.