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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+."
Argh... do i wait for athlon64 or opteron, or do I get one of these bad boys?! Decisions, decisions...
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
There have been rumors about AMD going for a 400MHz bus for quite some time now. Some chipsets even have experimental support for it. With the Athlon 64 being delayed until September I would say that is the only way for AMD to try and stay competitive with the Barton core.
Maybe I'm being a little arrogant, but I still feel this isn't really much to be that excited about.
.: Max Romantschuk
Not only that, but both processors are at about the same price.
.. never thought I would say that!
Not to mention the AMD runs cooler than the Intel chip.
Whoa
I was actaully a little worried that when a Macs switched to the PPC970, memory fast enough for it's initial 450MhzDDR bus would be prohibitively expensive. They might have been forced to increase the bus multiplier to maintain their target price point, or they might have just needed really expensive RAM.
With this 400mhz bus and a bit of upwards evolution, this shouldn't be a problem by the time 970 based macs are released. yay
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Hmm. Yes, the K7 has gone from 500MHz to 2250MHz over its lifespan so far - but Intel's P6 core went from 150Mhz PPro to 1400MHz PIII.
Looks to me like they could still have plenty of room to play.
Just how much influence does the bus speed have on the system as a whole?
My CPU is running at 266mhz now, what improvment would I see if I upgraded to a 333mhz bus chip with the same clock speed?
Just curious!
It's not just a move to 64 bit. See Ars Technica's article (posted here, yesterday, I believe) for an explanation of some of the other advantages of x86-64... they've taken the opportunity to add some new features and remove some of the old ones that weren't being used anymore.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
I just recently bought an Abit based NForce2 Athlon Motherboard. I have my DDR3200 running at a pretty 200mhz (so 400mhz DDR) and my FSB is at 181mhz (so 362mhz DDR). I have made some changes so I need to try for a 200mhz (400mhz DDR) FSB again. I can tell you that just upping the FSB and your memory bandwidth can have great performance benefits for memory intensive apps (such as gaming). So this will be a great boost for the current XP line. Oh, and in case anyone is wonding, I have an XP2100+ (1.73ghz) running very nicely at 2.2ghz!
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I usually try to help my friends build their computers. The key things to remember are: the best time to build a computer is as long as you can hold out, because the longer you wait, the faster and cheaper your hardware is going to be. Also, look at pricepoint. You know how Walmart has those labels on their price tags that say "17.8 cent/oz" ? Do that with your hard drives. Right now, 120gb drives are $100 on pricewatch, 160gb drives are $160. 120 has the best price point. Athlon prices increase about $10 each until you get to 2200, where they jump by like $40. Keep in mind that if you build a computer for a reasonable amount of money you can do it more often if you choose to and you'll never finish building one and be unhappy with the speed.
Whale
AMD better forget these little incremental speed bumps and switch to a whole new architecture this year if they want to remain competetive.
It's called x86-64. The Opteron ships next month.
The current architecture is like milking a deadhorse and they are already running waay too hot.
I did not need that mental image...
Current Thoroughbred and Barton core Athlons don't run all that hot. An Athlon 3000+ runs cooler than a 3GHz P4.
I reclocked my TBred core Athlon XP 1700+ to 8x202MHz (404MHz DDR) on my ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard (Corsair PC3200C2 DIMM). I kept the default core voltage (1.5v). MemTest86 verified that it works reliably. Upping the FSB is mostly a matter of motherboard and memory support, not CPU support (outside of being able to adjust the clock multiplier). A few years ago I reclocked a 150MHz Pentium to 1.5x100MHz. Worked just fine.
Actually, g++ will peg your CPU. Compiling C++ code is processor intensive enough that reading files from disk isn't the bottleneck. During a big C++ compile, my processor usage will however around 70-80% on a 2GHz P4.
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Why is this a big deal when Intel is moving to 2x faster (800MHz) bus later this year?
I am well aware that the 400mhz bus on p4s is quad pumped, and is truely running at 100mhz fsb (or a bit more for 533).
:)
:) bad habbits)
I am aware that AMD 400mhz bus is a double pumped 200mhz fsb.
Could someone explain what "double pumped" actually means? if I think back I remember hearing something about how in doulbe pumped.. the cpu grabs data off the bus at the beginning, and the end of a single clock cycle. is there a downside to doing things this way?
Or perhaps.. this is the best way things should be done, and cpu designers should concentrate on LOWERING mhz (for heat/energy reasons), and UPPING the amount of data/instructions it can do in a single clock cycle?
So eventually we could move toward a computer that can run on a single clock cycle, which would be a mhzless computer? I know there is theory somewhere in there
Would it not help voltage/heat greatly if the bus was 33mhz and (12x) pumped?
--Zuchini.
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I think you overstate the case. The Nforce 2, for example, provides a superb upgrade path. It will take everything AMD spits out the fab in the foreseeable future, except Hammer.
I just upgraded to an Abit NF7-S Nforce2 mobo, with an AXP 1800+ and 512MB of PC2700 for less than $300 (from Newegg). My next immediate upgrade was to OC the CPU bus to 166 to synchronize CPU/RAM at 333. That provided a decent improvement, according to Futuremark. And my next upgrade will be to replace the CPU and RAM with a Barton 3200+ and PC3200/3500, running at 200/400 FSB (which Nforce 2 is capable of), once the price comes down a bit. I also plan to add dual SATA drives in RAID 0 config to boost that hdd performance. Dual SATA is included on the mobo.
In fact, I can't remember a time since I started building my own PCs in '97 that one mobo has provided such outstanding upgrade potential. Of course, if you're rich and can buy that NF2, Barton, PC3500, and dual SATA all in one fell swoop, more power to ya. But for those of us with only a few hundred to spend at a time, Nforce2 provides a very nice upgrade path with plenty of longetivity. At least until we start lusting after K8 mobos...
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The problem with such an approach is that it would drastically increase latency between the memory and the processor. While theoretically you could transfer an enormous amount of data in a short amount of time, random access to data would be very slow. The actual bandwidth comes into effect when a large amount of data is being fed to the processor in a steady stream, but when you need only a small bit of data, it would travel at the actual bus speed across the pipe, in this case 200mhz for the Athlon and 133mhz for the Pentium 4. This is why the Pentium 4 excels using Rambus at 32ns while the Athlon prefers 8ns DDR.
Not true! I have my KT266a motherboard here running a barton, it's just got the FSB underclocked, it runs cool and faster than my old tbird. And this system has PC3200 DDR RAM=, it just is running at PC2100 speeds right now. My next purchase wil be a new mobo that can take FULL advantage of the CPU an RAM. Look at the Intel side, they change the PHYSICAL pinout so you CAN'T do this. The athlon has been on one single pinout while intel has done FC-PGA, FC-PGA2, 427(?), 472(?).
DOn't underestimate the power and value you can get from underclocking.
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