THG Looks at ClawHammer Mobo

An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware Guide managed to get a first look at the new Socket 754 ClawHammer motherboard. While they don't provide the benchmarks that you might be looking for, they do an excellent job and providing pictures and an overview of the ClawHammer Platform."

Comments

Re:Interesting

[dubiousmike]

This might be ok for gaming, but having worked for a music software company in the past, we'd ALWAYS tell customers to stay away from mobos with onboard audio. Latency is usually very high which comes into play when recording and playing multiple tracks with live effects.

Drop outs galore.

Six more pictures

[loomis]

Here

Also has a brief blurb in German

Loomis

Older Link, Computex pictures

[ackthpt]

Mostly mockups, but here's some of what to be expecting in the future, at x-bit labs

Over on the Enquirer, a correction was made to an article overnight concerning shipment dates for the Clawhammer, it will not be further pushed back, to first half of '03.

Looking that stock quotes this morning I saw this: INTC INTEL CORP 14.0099 -1.5%
I assume Yahoo stock reporting is still using one of those weird old Pentiums

Re:At least they're smart enough

[Merlin42]

Actually just one component of the northbridge, the memory controller, was moved into the CPU. Other things such as: AGP interface, interface to southbridge, etc (hmmm is there anything else?) still need to be on a separate chip.

Re:What are Vacuum tubes?

[f97tosc]

Out of plain curiousity (and probably because of inexperience) I'm curious on what exactly vacuum tubes are in relationship to sound, what advantages/disadvantages they offer and anything else interesting to know

Vacuum tubes were used before the invention of transistors. They serve basically the same function, but are much bigger, draw more power and are slower in their response. For these reasons, they are hardly used any more.

However, when they are used to amplify sounds, they give a somewhat different sound than do transistors. Many audiophiles argue that the vacuum tube sound is superior.

However, and now comes my personal opinion, recently something of a hype has started around tubes. People who don't really know much about sound systems take tubes as a guarantee for getting superior performance. They fail to realize that the sounds are just different and which one is superior is largely a matter of personal taste - and what type of sound is being amplified. I am not at all convinced that tubes are better for sound effects in games, for example (as they have a slower response).

Tor

Corrections+Link

[Perdo]

This is a response to a bunch of posters who were modded up that misunderstand hammer architecture

"to have active cooling on the north bridge, too many new, high speed bus mobos are coming out right now with passive cooling that doesn't come close to making it easy to OC"

The chipset "Northbridge" does not get over clocked with the CPU using hyper transport. The memory controller is on the cpu. So you can increase the speed of the CPU and memory without affecting the chipset "Northbridge" at all. I used quotes around Northbridge because all the features that most people think of as being part of the Northbridge are in fact incorporated into the CPU.

"What, still only 32-bit PCI slots? :::yawn:::"

This motherboard contains a hyper transport to 32 bit PCI chip. Hyper transport runs at 6.4GB/s. PCI 32 is 133 MB/s. The manufacturer chose to use 32 bit PCI because this is a commodity board. Theoretically, a motherboard could include 6 PCI-X busses supporting 6 cards each before saturating the hyper transport bus.

Powerpoint Show about Hammer family architecture. "save target as".

Read the show notes! AMD did not edit them out.