Shorts and Bears: Run to cover!

The bearish position game on AMD is over.

AMD has unveiled a new line of power efficient processors, the official news here. For instance, a Desktop Athlon 64 X2 can be made with a power envelope of mere 14 Watts!! that's about 25% of the power consumption of the promised Intel Merom mobile chip.

Why is this important?:

• Fanless: Can use just a passive disipator: No noise, no mechanical parts that wear down and deteriorate
• No overheating: Longer lasting circuits, better overclocking possibilities
• Tighter packaging (same space, more processors), or alternatively: A smaller media center pc
  
• Better accessibility: It is easier to work in a computer that doesn't have a turbine of a fan cooler
• Longer lasting battery
• At 14 watts, a pedal or a hand crank power device makes sense (although it is true I am kidding ;-)
  
• Smaller electricity bill: Remember that heat in a computer requires air conditioning that is also expensive; it has been calculated (sorry about not having the link) that the electricity bill in supporting air conditioning is twice what the computer itself consumes.
• Once the upcoming revolution of solid state storage (using Flash memories instead of harddrives) takes place, the brand with the best power envelope would be the natural choice for the designers of an entirely new generation of computing devices whoose batteries will last a lot more, like what happened when the world switched to digital mobile telephones compared to analog.

Why is AMD able to pull this trick off?: Silicon On Insulator. AMD does strained germanium doping silicon on insulator chips. Intel only does Strained Silicon. Today, the transistors are so small that they can't prevent current leakage --a problem that gets exponentially worse with shrinking dimensions-- thus, although the shrinkage to 65nm still gives power benefits due to smaller transistors, there is trade-off that explains why Intel's products at 65nm have been so rather dissapointing. In any case, SOI means that the transistors are floating in an insulator that helps a lot with the leakage. Intel insists in claiming that SOI is just a fanciful and expensive way to do chips without concrete benefits. Remember that in my previous articles, I have serious doubts at the possibility of Intel promised power envelopes to be true...

Another thing: A lot of people and investors were worried about AMD doing this worldwide advertising campaign with Intel announcing a giant progress in power consumption in their chips, for a while some people became worried at Intel promised products being actually superior in power consumption to AMD's; but no way, this was the trick AMD had up its sleeves.

Thus, from the point of view of an investor, Silicon On Insulator is becoming a huge strategical (long term) AMD advantage that is being reaped in Power Consumption and perhaps soon enough in Z-Ram gigantic caches and the techniques that IBM claims give huge switching speed increase. Intel announced that they are already moving towards 45nm, without Silicon On Insulator, thus all these benefits of SOI may evidentiate Intel's move to 45nm as rushed and worthless, another huge effort lost, if they have to go back to square zero to rethink their production lines to include SOI. (Perhaps something like that would occur with immersion anyway)

And remember that to be fair, the Front Side Bus should be counted in a comparison to AMD processors, or at least the power consumption of the integrated memory controller should be discounted, so, AMD numbers are actually even better!!

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