Brisbane is AMD’s recently launched 65nm processor. It’s been discussed whether this new revision would bring any performance improvements or if it was just a matter of a simple die shrink. Previously published benchmarks pointed to the latter and now that Nedjo has posted results of his own at Xtremesystems we can conclude that this is pretty much the case, so . There is no or very little improved performance when you compare with a 90nm processor from AMD. What does look promising though are the low temperatures, not to mention the really low voltages which is possible during some scenarios.
The fact that processor can’t be pushed further than 3.1GHz using air cooling kills some of the joy though. This is far from uncommon with the SOI (Silicon On Insulator) process AMD uses though, but it really spoils the enthusiast angle when the equivalent Intel Core 2 Duo can be pushed a lot further.
We are still in an early stage as motherboard manufacturer are still working on making good BIOSes and softwares for the new processors. Which unfortunately makes it hard to trust the positive angles as well, the temperatures and the voltage. Unfortunately the motherboard manufacturers seem to be having some problems of their own, but from what it seems we should be able to expect Athlon 64 X2 processors which performs like the old ones, but at lower temperatures and voltages.
