When these 45nm's come out, do you guys think there will be a major price drop in the other CPU's that are 65nm?
I don't understand why some people care so much about the process size when they don't even understand it.
NM is short for nanometer. Any reference to process size in nanometers refers to the size of a single transistor located on the processor. The easiest way to increase performance of a chip is to increase the number of transistors on it. Therefore a chip using a smaller process size than another can in theory fit more transistors on a die of the same size.
However, two identical chips with different process sizes will still perform exactly the same. The only distinguishing differences would be that because transistors are smaller on one chip, that chip requires less power to operate because a smaller transistor obviously requires less power than a larger one. However, when transistor size becomes smaller the size of the insulation on that transistor also becomes smaller. Engineering defects can cause a transistor with poor insulation to leak current and thus become less efficient, hotter, slower etc.
A 45nm chip is cheaper to produce than a 65nm chip because it requires less silicon because of the smaller transistor size; so no, a 65nm chip will rarely be cheaper than a 45nm chip. THE PROCESS SIZE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PERFORMANCE OF A CHIP.
DX 10.1 is cooming soon. It wont be supported by the nVidia 8 series, only the 9 series, which should come out at the end of this year/ start of nxt year.
DirectX 11 is comiing soon too mate. People don't understand that directX is simply a rendering path. So long as the game engine is built with a backport to a previous rendering path the game will still work, regardless of whether or not your current GPU supports the most recent rendering path or not. If a rendering or instruction set path is so important, why do people buy Core 2 processors? Those processors attempt to use an x86-64 instruction set known as EM64T yet they have limited support with actual x86-64 based applications. Why are people not jumping up and down suggesting to wait until EM64T has better support? I wonder if anyone else even knows that