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..."

Comments

well thats nice

[ZenBased]

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

Re:well thats nice

[Zathrus]

Unless you are a gamer or looking to compute Pi to the last digit

Or are wanting to do things like rip MP3s (trivial) or burn DVDs (non-trivial; technically it's the MPEG2 mastering, not the burning, that takes the CPU time). Developers, graphics artists, and most engineering can also use as much CPU as is available. For just a plain old file server you do very well by using the cheapest (in terms of purchase and run cost) that you can get. A webserver probably needs more juice. A database server definitely does. Trivial home use excluded of course. I'm not talking about trivial usages -- they can always be solved easily.

Wake me when a cheap "build your own system" RISC alternative hits the market.

When you realize that the core ISA of all x86 chips is RISC let me know. Not to mention that most of the classic "RISC" designs have deviated far from the "reduced" portion of that moniker. Looked at the Power or PowerPC ISA recently? RISC was created not because a reduced instruction set is inherently better, but because it allowed for a number of technologies such as pipelining, branch prediction, caching, and so forth to be implemented. Every single one of those is in x86 architecture now. Sure, the ISA is still a mess, but it's a better price/performance than anything else out there. All the naysayers have been disproven, time and time again. And yes, when I was a little college student I was horrified at the design of x86. Then I grew up.

Re:offtopic..

[Trigun]

The Slashdot staff created this story with a timestamp from a Mars watch. It's thirty nine minutes off.

Re:Grhh...

[binaryDigit]

AMD's new stuff has been pretty impressive, but it really bothers me when they pull this type of stuff: AMD Athlon 64 3700+ 2.4GHz 1MB Q2 '04 AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 2.4GHz 512KB Q2 '04

What's the problem. They're saying that having the smaller cache gives you less performance. Are you upset that they happen to have the same clock speed? I assume you'd prefer nomenclature more on the order of "AMD Athlon 64 2.4/512 and 2.4/1024"? In many ways they way they are currently doing it is more descriptive to the average buyer. No guessing as to how much performance you're giving up by going with the smaller cache ,or how much you're gaining by going with the bigger (performance benchmark inflation not withstanding).

Re:Grhh...

[TrueBuckeye]

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.

Socket, shmocket ... I want RAM!

[ackthpt]

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?

Re:Socket, shmocket ... I want RAM!

[BigDumbAnimal]

Call Sun.

socket types

[ynohoo]

Hopefully this will shed some light on what AMD is trying to do with all the different socket types..

Making us buy more motherboards, of course!

Dual Processors?

[Krieger]

What the article does not cover, is when we will be able to purchase non-Opteron Dual processors. Since they are inherently capable, it would be nice to know when we'll be able to build a performance (non-ECC) dual desktop.

G5 looks like ramping up faster

[beelsebob]

By the look of the figures the Athlon 64 is margionally faster than the G5 clock for clock... (the 2.2 Ghz beating the 2 Ghz G5 convinvingly and the 2Ghz ones locked in a tight battle). It looks a lot like AMD are gonna have to ramp up faster though, because IBM are gonna have 3Ghz G5s by Q3 this year, and AMD are only saying 2.6Ghz by Q4. Bob

Re:Real Mhz on the 4000 chip?

[DanglingPointer2004]

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.

Athlon Thunderbird

[Chicks_Hate_Me]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was told the PR xxxx+ was in comparison of what a Athlon Thunderbird clock speed would be.