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AMD's Roadmap revealed
NoPants writes "It looks like the aces at Anandtech were able to get their hands on some of AMD's internal roadmaps. Anand has some interesting information including the new upcoming Socket 939 CPU standard as well as AMD's predicted release dates for Athlon 64 4000+ processors. Hopefully this will shed some light on what AMD is trying to do with all the different socket types..."
but my amd 700mhz proc is still quite fast enough to give me debian, fluxbox, openoffice etc.. ah well there must be enough people out there who cant live without a fast proc
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There's no question Athlon 64 and AthlonFX are great products. That being said:
*Do they really need to be different products? Opteron is your product for server/high-end workstations, Duron (and now Athlon XP) is low-end... you want Athlon64 to be mainstream, right?
*Is it really a good idea to have the memory controller on the CPU? OK, I buy that it increases performance, but it hasn't lowered mainboard costs and all I've seen it doing is causing a rift between the A64 and AFX product lines, since Athlon64 doesn't have a dual-channel memory controller.
*Why in the world introduce an AthlonFX based on Socket 940, especially at the outrageous price, when you're moving to socket 939 imminently?
I think it would have been more of a slam-dunk as a platform and a "brand" to release Athlon64 as all dual-channel, all Socket 939 (or some standard), and left Opteron as the high-end platform. Any other takers?
Not to mention the fact that it lowers costs to them, and thus to the consumer, to do this. From what I've heard, they are able to take cpu's with some bad cache, which isn't uncommon, disable that non-functioning section, and then sell the cpu as a 512k cache cpu rather than wasting the entire chip. Lower performance, lower cost, but less waste. This is a far cry from the world of the Intel 486 sx vs dx with the math co-processor fiasco.
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee...
The only reason I'm even considering one of these gems is so I can cram more memory into a system for video work. All the boards I've seen for Athlon 64 max at 3Gb. The SK8* boards for the Athlon FX will take, IIRC 8Gb. Where's the boards I can cram 32 or more into?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So 940 gets moved to opteron only
:)
939 encompasses both Athlon64/FX chips, starting in Q2.
754 is relegated to the next gen AthlonXPs (with the on die memory controller, but only 32 bit)
462 dies a slow death.
Why can't every CPU made just fit on Socket 7...
With all the talk of unexpected 90nm delays and scaling problems over at Intel, one hopes AMDs problems are just typical delays with a new process. At any rate, we hope AMD will push ahead of Intel with the K8 architecture. IFF this happens, how on earth are they going to market them using their "false" speed ratings. Their rating system is flawed in that it uses Intel chips as the gold standard to measure performance against. You can't market a 4000+ if Intel has no 4GHz processor. If you do, you risk having the rating not match when Intel catches up, which makes the numbers completely meaningless. Today, they at least help to compare apples and oranges.
The ratings have been mostly accurate when comparing AMD cpus, and they're useful when talking to non-computer people rather than explaining things like cache size, locality, etc. With the Athlon64, it should be even more accurate since they now control the memory controller. If the performance rating can make it easier for the average person to compare systems accurately and pick the better value for them, then I'd say it's a good thing.
Also, normal users don't care about 10% performance differences. I've found a good way to relate to this is to think about old computers. Do you really think of the difference between a P133 and a P166? No, they're both from the p5 generation, with a L2 caching up to 64MB or 128MB depending on chipset and the cpu performance is basically equal (slow). If a p166 will do the job you need nowdays, a p133 probably will too, and it's doubtful that you'll notice much difference.
False advertising? It's called marketing. They never said "Our 3200+ is equivalent to Intel's P4 3.2C". Find that on the AMD site and you are making sense. Also, compare a duron chip to a celeron chip that are "rated the same". There is no comparison, but then, neither company specifically said "these two chips are the same speed", so you can't really complain. You can't blindly trust a number to tell you how well a processor will perform, there's a lot more to it than MHz and GHz. As for Tom's Hardware, I would look at who pays their bills before counting on their "benchmarks" too closely.
The point is that most people keep a CPU for more than a few months, generally for several years. A 64-bit OS is coming. So, why would AMD spend time developing another 32-bit architecture, then have to switch to 64-bit when the software is made? It makes more sense to get there first, so that when the software comes, you've got a proven, trusted technology.
Also, the Athalon64 and AthalonFX chips blow the old XP chips out of the water, so it's not equivalent at all.
I would not want to run doom3 on my athlonXP 1700 with a limited geforce4TI. That is for usre.
I seem to remeber the leaked demo running playably on a 1Gig celery and geforce2 MX.
You'd think they've had plenty of time to optimize code since then.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
Well you have compared an apple with an orange. A Athlon 2800 is not on par with a Pentium 2800. On some benchmark the Athlon could loose, but on other Win. If you want to try to compare the 2, compare them on the exact application you use and need power to use them. Not some synthetic benchmark, or ISPEC or FSPEC and then you could make your choice. But please don't troll about the PR rating. AMD NEVER say that the PR rating is something equal to the frequency of an Intel processor. And as a side note. If you compare your applications on the 2 architectures: Please recompile them with the exact architecture of your processor and the hadoc optimizer. This can change a lot of thing. I am not an AMD or Intel FAN. I just choose the best Proc/MB at the best price for the work I need to do. (And I have the facility to try them before buying :))
What a load of crap. I have bought only AMD processors and I swear by their performance. I jump at the chance to race a P4 touting fool through a compile of Mozilla. But this is getting ridiculous.
They've got to the point with all these different lines that it's no longer possible to talk AMD CPU's with anyone but the most avid AMD enthusiast. If you do try to talk the talk it ends up being a group memory excercise to see if together we can remember 50% of the difference in the varying jungle lines of processors.
Opteron is a good thing. Keep it simple. Give the FX a real name too. Don't call it an Opteron FX or 64 FX or whatever the hell it might be. Give it a damned name. How about an AMD Jargon? That would be a good name for a processor. If they all had names, you could associate the capabilities of the lines to the names and people could pick a favorite and learn the product.
As it is there must be extremely few people that can rattle off all the cache sizes, 398043+++ ratings, what core it is, blah blah blah. Not only do the different lines have different specs, but there are different specs within a line. There several instances of the same + rating with different specs in the same line. "I got a 2600+" "Which one?"
Not that I won't do all the research before I buy the next one, but I envy the Intel enthusiast that can just look and say Bigger is Better, and buy what they can afford.
I can't imagine my the other members of my family buying an AMD. They'd have to take a 3 week course, 2 hours a day, before they'd know which of the AMD's to buy. "This one costs more, but is it better?" "I have no idea." "This one has a bigger rating." "Yeah, but I heard this one is more advanced."
Is AMD hoping nobody will know what they're buying? Is that the ultimate goal? Why not just put a random number on each chip and put a MSRP on it and call it good.
The plain Athlon 64, sure. I see why someone would buy that. If you want decent performance but also want to keep things dirt cheap, that's a nice chip. I think a low-power "mobile" version of that processor will also be a winner.
But if you want to spend a little extra money and build a "hotrod" machine, the Athlon 64 FX is a dumb move. Most CPU-bound stuff that people do, is parallelizable. (The only major exception I can think of, is that today's apps for multimedia encoding, tend to not take advantage. But they could (e.g. the portion after every key-frame could be handled by a different thread).)
So just spend a little more (it's really not much) and get multiple Opterons. If you're really hurting for money, get "obsolete" 240 models, and two of them will still run rings around any Athlon64FX or single-P4EE system that money can buy.
The class of problems that can't take advantage of multiple CPUs but still needs lots of speed, is small. Maybe I'm just being dumb, but I just don't see a market for a socket-939 or single-socket-940 board. Why would AMD, and motherboard manufacturers, bother to spend money development something that hardly anyone needs?
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The "2800+" IS the speed. No, it's not the clock speed that the chip runs at, but that really doesn't make it any more or less relevant to the speed.
Intel decided to market their processors using one totally meaningless measure of performance, the clock speed.
AMD decided to market their processors using a different totally meaningless measure of performance, the model numbers.
The problem with the chips is not so much sleezy marketing as with are ridiculous focus on clock speed. That's like buying a car solely based on the displacement of the engine. Sure, a 3.0L engine might produce more power than a 2.5L engine, but that certainly isn't always the case, and it sure doesn't tell you much else about the car. But if the public bought cars based ONLY on the displacement of the engine like they buy PC's based ONLY on the clock speed of the processor, you better believe that companies would bring out "3.0+" engines with 2.5L of displacement.
In any case, AMD's marketing numbers have been extremely successful for the company. They almost instantly increased AMD's profit when they first brought them out years ago. Argue all you like, but the fact is that the computer buying public is, by and large, generally uniformed and buys systems based on two numbers alone, clock speed/model number of the processor and the price.