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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."
I think this pretty much defines putting the cart in front of the horse. still a fun read though.
--aiee
I love the old-timey tubes used for the sound. I wonder how reliable these will be. I'm old enough to remeber having to replace tubes in our old tv back in the day.
Slashdot, come for the goatse, stay for the trolls.
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.
My co-worker was telling me about this earlier this morning. I especially like the vacuum tubes for the audio on the motherboard. Audiophiles will be drooling over that. Do they make mobos now with that on them?
On a side note, I like the number of pins on the cpu socket. Hammer is gonna be interesting to say the least.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
They have vacuum tubes on the motherboard for 5.1 surround sound.
Are they crazy?!? Everyone knows that sound doesn't travel through a vacuum.
What, still only 32-bit PCI slots? :::yawn:::
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
No wait, wasn't he Darth Maul's second cousin?
No, I'll get it. Doesn't it attach to the Incus and transmit computer sounds to the ear drums?
Oh, I give up.
Interesting that Aopen is showing off another Tube Audio Board. This one with a three tube design for even more powerful sound.
I wonder if this trend is going to continue on more of aopen's boards. There must be a demand for the original tube board if they play on making a more powerful 3 tube version in the future.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
3 DDR slots? I know there are loading issues with lots of that ram but this chip needs RAM it has a 40bit address bus coming out of it. At least 12GB physical ram, then it will be a serious challenge to high end cad machines. It they aim at just replacing your desktop, it will not do very well in my opinion.
Hedley
I am just curoius, wouldn't the vacum tubes tend to shatter somewhat easily? I carry my PC around quite a bit for LAN games and the like and if I were to ever drop my computer, that would really screw them up. Damn these weak, nerdy arms! -
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
During AMD's earnings conference call they delayed the rollout of clawhammer/opteron AGAIN. This assumes they are still in business.. (They have been losing money for a while)
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
Here
Also has a brief blurb in German
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
Certainly the true audiophiles often use tubes for their systems, but this does not mean that these are superior for all situations.
What kind of sound will go through the system? A normal transistor has a 'snappier' sound to it, which is better for a lot of modern music, and I would imagine for sound effects in computer games.
I guess if you want the best for your classical LPs then maybe this is something for you, er, no, then you would be better of to get a real amplifier.
Tor
For supposedly playing to the low-end audiophile market, AOpen isn't doing a great job. Nowhere can I find what kind of tubes they're using!
Since six channels are being amplified (5.1) and three tubes are present, I'm assuming they're using three double-triodes in Class A configuration. Maybe 12AX7s? Note to AOpen: people care about this kind of thing.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
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
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
1. hack BIOS to utilize vacuum tubes in other ways 2. combine linux with ham radio technology 3. ??? 4. Profit!
For those of us who like having a motherboard we can place into a system and not have to worry about parts failing on it, the wonderfully solid-state nature of passive cooling is impossible to beat. If I want more performance, I'll either pay more or wait a little while longer, thanks. I want stability and a minimization of moving parts in my PC, because moving parts = failing parts. Failing parts are expensive!
How many active-cooling north bridge motherboards have you owned? I owned one. Its north bridge fan failed after only 3 months of constant use. Compared to every other motherboard I own, none of which require a fan (most don't even require a heatsink, and they power 1Ghz systems!), it was a terrible mistake purchase. I've since replaced it with a motherboard bought specifically because its north brigde used passive cooling. It's given no problems in the year+ of service it's given.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
... you're just going to love the relay-based video accelerator...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
They've been around for a long time. Here's one that's component-based, so you can "roll your own".
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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
I was under the impression that they were for the audiophiles who want better sound. That sort doesn't use the onboard sound, no matter how good it may be. It's pointless to use them on a motherboard. If someone really cares enough about sound quality to use vacuum tubes, they'll have their own sound card to use.
Besides, they just look ugly. 3 big balls of glass sitting on your motherboard. And then when one blows, you'll have to replace it.
Take the damn things off please!
Why do you bash the review for lacking benchmarks? This is still one of the sweetest reviews I've seen in a long time. The level of detail they get into about the hardware is awesome.
All circuits busy.
12ax7s would certainly make sense, as they're still in production in several places (Russia, China, Yugoslavia) and thus relatively cheap. They're also widely used in preamps of guitar amplifiers, so you can find them at your local Guitar Center...
The EF86 was popular for hi-fi preamp applications like this in the '50s and '60s because they had lots of clean headroom, but they're not used as much any more because the ones still in production have a nasty habit of being microphonic. You'd also need twice as many of them, since they're a single pentode in roughly the same bottle as a 12ax7.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
Looking at the sockets, I'm also a bit concerned about the heat cooking the board itself, since I've seen any number of PCB electronics over the years with tubes, where the board is blackish sometimes separating foil from board. Think about that with a 7 layer PCB.
Lastly, high voltage. Scary around all these low voltage things. I wonder why they didn't consider making a daughterboard and keeping things well isolated.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Fully agreed, in addition I think people should note that good tube pre-amp setups have more than one tube element per channel, and multple stages and great deal of other design elements. basicaly, this tube is in the setup just to give the nice even order harmonics that people like to hear. This is in addition to the Odd order harmonics that the other transistors are creating. and to top it off, who would consider any onboard sound chip to be Hi-Fi. when your signal sucks, your sound sucks, there is no really good way to fix that. Get a nice sound card and it will sound much better than this setup
Second, if you want some specific transfer function under overload, you can get it by design. There's a famous story about this. Some years back, Bob Carver, the well-known amplifier designer, took a tube amplifier that was well-regarded by the "high-end" audio nuts, and characterized its response with the usual test gear. He then designed a transistor amp with the same transfer function. In listening tests, listeners couldn't tell the difference.
But his transistor amp didn't sell. He then, as a joke, designed the Carver Silver 7, the most overdesigned tube amp of all time. Three chassis per channel, chrome-plated everything, insane price of about $25,000. It got great reviews. "Amp of the Decade" from The Absolute Sound.
I believe the main issue here is how both devices behave at the extremes of their linearity ranges. (i.e. where they distort) - Transistors tend to be pretty linear up to the point where they clip, while tubes have a more gentle gain compression, which is why their harmonics are different.
:)
I wonder what the audiophiles would think of a truly linear amplifier. (Either using devices that are backed off far from their peak power - low efficiency warning!, or by using distortion-correction techniques similar to those used by manufacturers of CDMA RF power amilifiers)
hmm... An audio predistortion amp would be a cool hack.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
gotta love those big honkin vacuum tubes on the AK86. mmmmmmmm.... heat...
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
This is a response to a bunch of posters who were modded up that misunderstand hammer architecture
:::yawn:::"
"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?
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.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Tubes are voltage amplifiers, transistors are current amplifiers.
Tubes and transistors produce different orders of harmonic distortion with the result that a transistor amp must opererate at a very low level of distortion to sound as good as a tube amp with a much higher distortion level. Transistor amps clip and go into distortion at very low levels of overload, tube amps enter this non linear region on a lower slope. Tube amps can be easier to listen to than transistor amps as a result of all of the above. However this mostly applies to bipolar transistors. Field effect transistors have transfer functions very much like pentode tubes and can mimic the sound of a tube amp, but most reference solid state amps have been bipolar.
I think most of the hype about tube amplifiers is greatly overrated. However the price of audio tubes and tube equipment on ebay proves how crazy some people are. We call them AudioPhools.
I've been overclocking 9 or 10 years years, with no stability issues. I don't do anything anything extreme with cooling, and in fact have a P100 which has been running at 133 for several years with only a passive heatsink (it is an extremely quiet computer).
I started long before any of this was trendy, with an AMD 386SX/33 which I always ran at 40. I've now got 300 and 333MHz K6-2s, each running at 350. And soon, I'll add an unlocked Athlon XP to the mix. These machines don't crash. Ever.
It's trivial, and simple: Don't go to far. Don't up the voltage beyond manufacturer specification for the speed you're trying to achieve. If anything seems at all funny about the scenario, back down a notch and try again - don't try to "fix" it with fans and peltiers and waterblocks. Once you've found a speed that seems to work, it might not be a bad idea to step it down another notch to help with future operating variables.
The next step is rather simple: Leave it the fuck alone. You've already had all of the overclocking joy that your particular hardware combination will yield. Enjoy your pennies saved and be done with it.
CPUs are rated in the factory using similar methods. They all come off of the same line, and are tested at a high-ish clock speed. If a core fails a test at a given speed, it is retested at consecutively lower speeds until it passes. The resultant number is stamped on the package and/or burned into the multiplier.
In theory, anyway. The reality lately is that toward the end of a given core's life, there's a point at which lower speed chips simply aren't produced anymore, while there is still market demand for them. So, there's a lot of lower-cost, factory-underclocked chips on the shelf, so that AMD and Intel can stay competitive with eachother in the mid-to-low end markets.
This is evident from the price structure of commodity OEM CPUs. When there are 3 or 4 mid-range speeds are within a few dollars of eachother, they're quite likely to be exactly the same part, and may even be from the same batch.
It is inarguable that running some of these chips at faster-than-marked speeds is not in any way overclocking.
And, at any rate, it's heat that destroys CPUs, not clock speeds that are within the design parameters of the core. For this conservative approach to overclocking, added heat very nearly at non-issue status.
Therefore, I strongly suspect that my machines will last forever, as far as I'm concerned, just like every solid state device should (obvious exceptions for dried-up capacitors and flaming power supplies may apply), and that they will always have an extra month or two of useful life in them before they're deemed too slow for the tasks at hand -- for free.
Kid-proof tablet..
Even on chipsets that come with so-called "Active" cooling (laughter), that piddly little fan doesn't do much except make noise. You could add a new fan, but small fans are all likely to fail and mainly just add noise.
I have a heavily overclocked abit mobo running at a bus of 152mhz, rock solid. The processor is watercooled, but the chipset isn't. All I did was take off the joke heatsink it comes with and do some mods.
If you want to cure northbridge woes forever, you need:
- A athlon heat sink (I used a volcano-II)
- A saw, dremel, or other primitive machine tools
- Goop-brand adhesive
- Some alcohol and arctic silver
Take the stock heatsink off. Cut the large one so it can fit on the motherboard. Clean the northbridge off with some alcohol. Put arctic silver on the chip, and a good pile of goop around the outside of the chip. Goop can be worked off, it is a weak bond against the metal of the heat sink. Put the sink on and smoosh it down. Put something heavy on it for 24 hrs, presto. If you have any airflow through your case whatsoever your northbridge will stay at ~29-30C even heavily overclocked.
..don't panic