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AMD's Athlon XP 2700+
kraven_73 writes "According to some Taiwanese sources, AMD will officially reveal its Athlon XP 2700+ processor on the 7th of October. Most interesting is that this CPU will have a 333 MHz FSB. The first implementation of this increased FSB on Athlon platform. It is expected that the novelty will be based on the latest Thoroughbred core stepping 1, just like the current Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+, and will work at 2.17GHz."
This, of course, is the risk of having a really sexy new item coming down the pipeline. At some point those Xtreme gamers/programmers/modelers/or just people who like to have the latest and most expensive thing on their desk to play solitaire with, begin to hold back on purchases and wait for that new item.
I'm on the fence, but at the rate I've actually done anything to build my next system (hey, I did buy a cabinet! :-) the wait for the Hammer shouldn't be much longer (why does this name summon the memory of the artwork inside PF:The Wall, hmm, something there, but what...)
Fortunately for AMD, not everyone is holding off and all these really spifftacular improvements of , what will eventually be $60 processors in a couple years, are pretty damn exciting.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Right now the AthlonXP has a FSB of 133DDR or an effective 266. Increasing this to 166DDR or 333 gives an additional 25% bandwidth. This means that the IS a point to putting DDR333 ram in an athlon MB and seeing a real performance advantage. I personaly would like to see them skip 333 altogether and go to 400. This would bring them up to one generation behind the P4 in terms of FSB bandwidth and would even out alot of the test scores that ppl are complaining about right now.
In case you have been asleep for the last year the FSB is the AthlonXP's largest bottleneck!
As for overclocking: Remember when the 266 FSB came out and ppl were complaining about the low overclock potential on the new boards? well that will happen again, but the second generation of boards will ROCK for overclocking. I have my money on boards that will handle a 400 FSB within 6 months of volume market penetration for the 333FSB.
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XML causes global warming.
Okay, let me preface this by saying I'm genuinely curious about the answer. So I'm not trying to sow the troll seeds here.
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That said, I'm curious about what people are using these super-fast processors for. Apart from upgrading so that you can play the immiment Unreal Tournament 2003 demo ("Only two weeks away!") and hoping to get the jump on a Doom 3 system -- what exactly are people doing with their super-high powered rigs?
I just upgraded to an Athlon XP 2000+ (from a PIII), and while I sorta dug the impressive 3DMark2001SE scores (over 10,000 with a Ti4600), I'm still not exactly sure what I need all this speed for.
For gaming, yes.
But for what else? MS Word still opens in a split-second.
OpenOffice 1.01 still opens pretty quickly.
IE, Netscape, and Opera still open in a split-second.
And, yes, now I run Quake3 with all the settings cranked.
But this sorta of "gee whiz, that's cool" wore off in a couple of days.
Now I'm left with a pretty powerful system, but I'm at loss as to what it has actually improved. Maybe if I were doing a lot of coding, then the compilation speeds would jump significantly, but I guess since my main coding right now is writing a fairly small (only around 6,500 lines) text-adventure in INFORM, I haven't really seen the jump in compilation speeds I'd see if I were compiling hundreds of thousands of lines of code
So, I'm curious. I haven't tried NWN yet, so maybe that's the sort of high-powered cybercrank I need to get myself hooked on the slickmercury speeds of AXP 2000+ and Ti4600.
There's always the new Neocron (sp?) beta 4 out
Anyone?
Depends what you define as a northbridge, and what you define as a FSB. The bus type (EV6, HyperTransport, whatever) is just a name for the signaling and protocol - the name of the bus itself can still be "Front Side Bus".
The "traditional" northbridge had a memory controller and an AGP controller, as well as a PCI controller. The PCI controller got moved completely off the North Bridge to the South Bridge and replaced with a proprietary interconnect in a lot of modern chips. The memory controller was moved on die, but the AGP controller is still off-die, and thus needs a chip for it. This chip could be called the "north bridge". It's just a name - AMD calls it the "HyperTransport AGP 3.0 Graphics Tunnel" (which doesn't really make much sense, as it also has a HyperTransport link to a south bridge - how does THAT relate to graphics?) but it's still a North Bridge, just without the memory controller.
There are two HT links on the system, which is why it makes sense to call it a "north bridge" and a "south bridge": there's a HT link from the CPU to the North Bridge (the AMD 8151) and a HT link from the North Bridge to the South Bridge (the AMD 8111).
So, yes, they do have a FSB, unless you want to call it something else: "highspeed HT link" and "lowspeed HT link" (for the North Bridge-South Bridge interconnect) maybe? Got me. It doesn't matter. The FSB has always been the high speed link out of the processor to a bridge chip, which then has a low speed link to another bridge chip which has all the PCI, LPC, ethernet, all that crap. Hammer doesn't change that, it just removes the memory controller from the North Bridge.