AMD Moving to a 400MHz Bus?

An anonymous reader writes "According to this tantalizing Infoworld Scoop, AMD soon introduce a 400 Mhz bus. Seems that SiS's big announcement at CEBIT is the SiS748 chipset, which supports both 400 MHz DDR & AGP 8X, and is targeted at the upcoming Athlon 3200+."

Comments

architecture

[qoncept]

AMD better forget these little incremental speed bumps and switch to a whole new architecture this year if they want to remain competetive. The current architecture is like milking a deadhorse and they are already running waay too hot. They need to make something big enough to give it a new name.

Re:architecture

[10Ghz]

You DO realize that we are talking about the bus-speed, not the CPU-speed? You don't increase the bus-speed by huge amounts overnight. Move from 333MHz to 400Mhz, while not groundbreaking, is significant.

As to the "whole new architecture"... It's called Athlon64, and it has 800MHz bus (and loads of other improvements). Available in september in a store near you.

Keep flogging that horse

[haplo21112]

It seems some what proper that so many of the revisions of the athlon have had horse names since they seem to keep beating it till they know its good and dead.

Is a 400MHZ bus really gonna help them all that much? How much more can this chip design take?

Re:Keep flogging that horse

[Andy Dodd]

I think it can take quite a bit more.

Even with half the stated bus throughput, the Athlon seems to do a good job keeping up with the P4, and at a lower price.

Even at a lower clock rate, the Athlon can beat a P4. The Athlon XP 3000+ has essentially the same performance as a P4 for almost all applications, even ones where you'd expect the P4 to excel at (Video encoding) for example.

It helps that throughput isn't everything - Latency is also important, and the P4 was designed around an extremely high-latency memory subsystem (RDRAM), while the Athlon was designed around a much lower-latency memory subsystem. All the throughput in the world isn't going to help you unless the turnaround between a data request and that data coming from memory is fast. The only exception is if you rearchitecture the whole system (and this includes changing the ISA, which means it can't practically be done for x86) around a high-throughput high-latency memory subsystem. (PS2 is the most valid example - That system is designed around throughput everywhere, and it's designed so that memory latency is a nonissue.)

And don't forget x86-64... That architecture is making me drool. (Forget the 64-bit registers - What's important in the short term is that AMD doubled the number of GPRs and vector registers.)

x86-64 >>>> IA-64

Re:finally

[ancukiewiczd]

The 4GHz is only when heavily overclocked. The fastest retail P4 runs at 3.06 GHz, which actually is about the same speed as the 3000+. The 3200+ should give a nice speed boost. Actually, the fastest-overclocked Athlon runs at about the same speed as the fastest-overclocked P4. Not only that, but both processors are at about the same price.

The computer clueless..

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't care. They'll react to Intel's crap the same way most of you react to nude pictures of CowboyNeal.

(Uh, with lust, that is.)

This in spite of the fact that unless you're compiling software, searching for extra-terrestrial life, or playing crack-the-encryption, you don't need 1+ GHz.

What you need is what AMD is offering - more speed on the bus. Depending on what you run, more ram. And everyone could use a faster hard drive. ..Even those who compile software will usually see better results from increasing bus speed + hard disk speed.

Do your part. Educate some of the clueless today!

Re:Damn

[EllF]

If you want to buy a computer that can run D3, wait for it to come out. About a month after its release, shop around for a new system -- you'll both be able to build a system that will be assured to work well for playing Doom, and reap the benefits of the latest hardware at the time.

The general rule of thumb for upgrading it to put it off for as long as you can, and then buy as close to the top of the line as you can afford.

I'm already at a 400MHz FSB

[eamber]

I've got my Athlon XP 2100+ running on a 400 MHz FSB (of course, that's overclocked)... but it definitely does seem "snappier" than the 266 MHz FSB. Certain apps seem to benefit from the extra bandwidth, but not everything.

Re:Question!

[Junior J. Junior III]

Depending on what you use the PC for, you might not notice anything at all. Current desktop PCs are more than adequate for web/email/office work, and have been since Intel first hit 300 MHz or so. I have a PII 400 running Windows 2000 at work that does not seem slow at all running all the basic, standard applications.

If you do stuff that involves digital video, compiling source code, or other types of activities that actually push the CPU, you might notice a difference between a 266MHz system bus and a 333MHz system bus.

The speed of the front side bus determines in part how fast information can get to the CPU from main memory. If you have fast memory + a fast FSB, you can get your CPU to work pretty darn fast. Your main performance bottlenecks are still going to be memory latency and hard drive access speed, though.

But once information gets from there to the main system memory, if you can keep that CPU at high utilization, you'll notice a pretty significant boost in performance.

Not always

[Andy Dodd]

I can choose a "top of the line" system, or a system that has 75-80% of the performance for half the price.

As a result, it's cheaper to buy a "lower end" system at a lower price and just replace it with a "lower end" system a year later. I'll get two systems, one of which is better than today's "top of the line", for the same price as one "top of the line" machine today.

Make sure you get something upgradable, of course.

Just look at CPU prices: Athlon XP 2500+ CPUs run around 2x the price of a 2000+. 3000+ CPUs are double that again. That's 4x the price for 1.5x the performance. Same for RAM, and to some degree hard drives. (With hard drives, you often get more "bang for the buck" by getting something close to top of the line. 120 gigs or so is currently the sweet spot as far as price per gig, and that's close to top of the line these days. But as soon as you jump to 160 or 200 gigs the price skyrockets. If you go down in size, you're spending not much less and getting significantly les.)

Re:Yummy

[gmack]

" Argh... do i wait for athlon64 or opteron, or do I get one of these bad boys?! Decisions, decisions..."

I think you just put your finger on why AMD sales are down. Opteron is so hyped up people are waiting for that. I'd feel sorry for them but I'm also waiting for the opteron before replacing my PC.

Re:Question!

[kauttapiste]

My CPU is running at 266mhz now, what improvment would I see if I upgraded to a 333mhz bus chip...

Hehe..If you're CPU is really running 266Mhz (I'm not gonna pick on your millihertz this time), you'll discover a whole new world with a BUS running faster than your old computer.. All I'm saying is put those old boxes with a nice FreeBSD installed to the closet and use them for screen/IRC-client! Imagine the uptime..

Re:It depends.

[dreamchaser]

Things are very different. Look at the Quake 3 engine. The higher the FSB goes, the faster it renders. Most modern (and not so modern, Q3 is OLD now) engines not only take up more space than the available cache, but they also rely on streaming large amounts of data from main memory. Higher FSBs, as long as memory speeds keep up with them, will accellerate most modern and not so modern gaming engines.

Re:Fed Up With AMD Systems

[one_line_enough]

Check out the CRC problems on MSI's (VIA) KT400 mbs. If winxp/via drivers happen to drop ide speeds from UDMA to PIO due to CRCs (still looking into it), other KT400 mbs might be experiencing the same problem, except that the users don't know about it - maybe this is the case where ignorance is not bliss. In the case of KT4V, MSI's idiotic solution to CRC problem is to slow down the ide speeds. The latest trend in the AMD world is to blame manufacturers of different components on the motherboard or the "other" guy, when something is wrong. Good examples are AMD and Tyan, Tyan and Crucial.

Death of the upgrade.

[Wino]

Anyone remember just a couple years ago when you could actually plan out a simple upgrade to your computer that would make it perform better for a modest price?

Toss in some extra RAM, wow no swapping!
Replace that CPU, doesn't Quake run good now!

The furious pace of bus speed changes have pretty much killed these types of upgrades for home/desktop users. Adding more PC2100 ram to their system when they know they're getting a DDR400 mobo is highly annoying. And forget about popping a new P4 or Athlons into your 1 year old mobo. Gotta buy $300 of new RAM and a $200 new DDR666-PC31337 AsusBitDragonMSI Ultra Deluxe to go with it!

Bleh.

Re:Death of the upgrade.

[Ramze]

I've been frustrated with this as well. I remember when PC133 ram was always backwards compatable with PC100 and PC66, but now memory makers are making PC133(only) chips... making it difficult to upgrade older systems at a reasonable cost (the PC133 chips are on sale for about 1/3 the price (with rebates)of the PC100's b/c there is a limited supply of PC100's)

BUT, as long as motherboard dimensions continue to shrink, chips become more integrated, and prices continue to fall, I don't see this as being a bad thing for the computer industry. Sooner or later, I think we'll have a small motherboard with a processor and connections for some standard I/O ports (possibly fiber optics) and a power supply connection. I think eventually, RAM, networking hardware, and video will all be on the processor die. (to me, this makes sense as connections need to become faster in order to increase performance of the system)It'll be simple to pull the motherboard and processor out and replace them with newer ones for a relatively low price b/c they are one unit. (processors could become integrated into the motherboard -- no need for a socket if they'll never be swapped out)

Granted, I'm thinking 10 years into the future... but, think. We're already putting 8 megs of cache on processors (I remember when I had only 8 megs of ram in my computer), Intel is putting wireless technology into CPU's, Modem and Networking hardware has been built into CPU's in the past, and now AMD is putting memory controllers into the CPU. I don't think it will be long before Nvidia partners with one of the CPU makers and integrates their GPU with someone's CPU. Graphics cards require ever-faster connections to the CPU. Changing BUS speeds and graphics card slot designs are great, but the graphics cards need increasing amounts of power and are suffering from overheating -- my solution would be to put the GPU and CPU together, let one heat sink work for both & let them share RAM and possibly even each other's registers as needed.

I think the upgrade of motherboards, cpus, and ram as seperate entities will go away, but the upgrade of a machine will become cheaper and simpler. Just pop out the motherboard with integrated cpu,gpu,ram,network card, and chipset and pop in a new one and connect to peripherals by some standard serial I/O ports.

My experience

[ComputarMastar]

I built my first Athlon system after seeing how well a friend made out with his Slot-A Athlon system. Socket-A 1.2GHz was the bleeding edge at the time so I got the 1.0GHz model w/ pc133.

After I'd pulled out half of my hair trying to figure out why it refused to run stable (or as stable as my Celeron 300A w/ Win98), I ditched the mobo for one of the new KT266A boards. It ran sort of OK for a month, then stopped running for more than 1 or 2 minutes at a time. After more hair-pulling I noticed that the power supply was putting out 3.9v on the 3.3v line and the power regulators on the board were too hot to touch. A new power supply, motherboard, and CPU later I was back in business... or so I thought.

It still had weird unexplainable crashes at odd times, so I installed Win2K and that helped a little, but it still wasn't stable. I was determined to have an Athlon system that was stable, so instead of going Intel, I started scouring message boards for anything that would help me get through this.

Many posts pointed at a buggy implementation of ACPI in the first revision of Soundblaster Live's, which I had. Got a Game Theater XP, but same problems. Finally found some info about how VIA wasn't even implementing PCI to spec, so it was time to look for a non-VIA board.

At the time it was mostly all-VIA or an AMD northbridge + VIA 686B southbridge combo. nForce had just come out, so I was hesitant to try an untested chipset, so the only other alternative was AMD's new SMP chipset. SMP was something I'd always wanted to try out and the Asus board could use my old RAM and CPU until I could afford a pair of the pricey Athlon MPs, so thats what I got.

About a year later, I'm still running it with a single XP 1800+ and it has been very stable. The only time it ever crashes is when I let it get too dirty and the geForce3 overheats.

Oh yeah, review sites are absolutely worthless if you're looking for stability. "Its very stable!" really means "It didn't explode while we overclocked the hell out of it for the 3 days we had it."

So anyway, my point is that some of us get burned bad by Athlon systems. Its only because I'm so stubborn (or maybe insane) that I stuck with it until I got it stable instead of switching to an Intel system and preaching the evils of AMD.

The REAL question...

[NerveGas]

The real question, at least in my mind, is whether they will make AthlonMP's with the 400-MHz bus. While it's not a wrap-up, indications seem to say that they won't, because it would compete with the hammers.

Seeing as how the AthlonMP motherboards have seperate busses for each processer, imagine if Nvidia made an "nforce" chipset with dual-channel memory for dual Athlons - each processer could get full memory bandwidth at the same time. That would be truly impressive, especially for RDBMS servers where you live and die on bandwidth.

But, of course, such a monster would be a direct competitor with the Hammers - and AMD's got too much at stake to let the Hammers fail.

steve