First of all, these processors, which are due in the third quarter of this year, not the middle of the year, are based on the same 90 nanometer process that the current Opterons use. "We can get a lot more mileage out of this process, and we are going to do that," explained Kirby. The Rev F chips will also make use of the current HyperTransport 1 infrastructure, too, rather than utilize a goosed version of the technology. The Rev F chips will have the same integrated 1 MB L2 cache memory per core, and will come in 68-watt Opteron HE and 95-watt Opteron standard variants; while Kirby didn't say this, it seems likely that AMD will eventually--but certainly not initially--offer a version, dubbed the Opteron SE, which runs at slightly higher clock speeds and emits more heat as well as the Opteron EE, which runs at 55 watts. With the future "Woodcrest" dual-core Xeon DP processor expected around the same time coming in at an 80-watt thermal design power (TDP), not including a memory controller (which the Opteron has integrated into the processor) and using hotter fully buffered DIMMs instead of DDR2 main memory, Kirby says that AMD doesn't need to move to a 65 nanometer process.
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