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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
http://www.virtualconcepts.nl/
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...
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.
"There several instances of the same + rating with different specs in the same line. "I got a 2600+" "Which one?""
The idea is that you don't have to know what the exact specs are. What AMD is trying to do is show that CPU performance is relative. Within a few percentage points, every 2600+ CPU will perform equally, regardless of its core, amount of cache, socket, memory lines, clock frequency, etc. That's the whole point - you don't have to know. If you're "in the know", you can look at individual 2600+ CPUs to see which one has more of what will help you in the specific applications you use. If you're a general user, then 2600+ is the only thing you need to know. How many people buy a 3.06GHz P4 instead of a 3.00GHz P4 because they think the former is faster? The clock frequency alone belies the fact that the higher FSB on the latter CPU will actually make it perform far better on nearly every application. AMD is trying to hand you the whole package in a single number to simply the buying process for everyday people.
The fact is, neither AMD nor Intel are telling the whole performance truth, nor could they do so. The only way to do that is to educate consumers about CPU mechanics, latency, IPC, L1/L2 cache, cache hits and misses, branch prediction, pipeline stages, and so on. The average consumer (hell, the average geek) can't understand half of these things. Thus, Intel has chosen to show the clock frequency of its CPUs, and AMD has chosen to use performance ratings that give consumers a performance index relative to the Athlon's Thunderbird core. Neither system is perfect, but neither system is more imperfect than the other, in my opinion.
"Is AMD hoping nobody will know what they're buying?"
AMD is hoping that those who need to know, will know, and that the rest who buy the "bigger number" will at least have an idea of what to get.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."