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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
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.
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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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.
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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