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

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.