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AMD to Adopt DDR2 Next Year
Hack Jandy writes "According to Anandtech, AMD has already developed a new processor lineup for Athlon 64 processors with DDR2. The article states that internal AMD roadmaps indicate the processors should debut early next year and will require a new 1207 pin socket."
So we have to dance to get the damn thing to work?
Personally, I never buy a motherboard with future CPU upgrades in mind. It's just not worth it, upgrading your CPU within the same general architecture rarely gives you much real-world performance.
The real performance boosts come from radical architectural changes - new memory subsystems, new processer types, new interconnect, etc. - and for any of those, you're going to need a new motherboard, period.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
1207 pins, pffft!
I'll hold out for the 1337 pin AMDs.
I for one welcome our elite cpu overlords.
1207 = 17*71. I wonder why this beautiful factorization isn't mentioned in the article.
Really, it doesn't. Since the memory controller is integrated in the CPU, there is no way to make one of these things run in todays DDR1 mainboards, regardless of the pin count. And since DDR2 has a different pin count than DDR1, of course the pin count of the memory contoller has to change, hence the pin count of the CPU changes.
Anyone complaining about "yet another socket" apparently hasn't understood this.
My wallet hurtz... But I've discovered I don't need it, since after almost twenty years of gaming I've quitted and I use my Athlon XP system mostly as DVB PVR, video player, some video editing and dvd burning. What I ask for is better OS, not hardware.
BTW since all most of the controllers are on CPU, I expect motherboard prices will decrease since there is not much to remain on them. In extreme, why spend money on the processor pins and the socket itself? Why not solder the CPU to motherboard, like in the old times of some 386 boards? With adequate hole in mobo, we can cool the CPU from both sides.
I'm not insane. My mother had me tested.
Well, I am freshly back from the AMD tech tour event in East Brunswick last night, and this specific question came during the Q and A with "TEH EXPERT5" - The question of DDR2 support.
The actual engineer on staff at the event answered it, and stated flat out that there was no performance gain until at least DDR2-667, and that alone "was only about 5% or so faster than DDR400 running in dual channel mode". He even went so far as to say that "DDR2-533, with it's increased latency over DDR400, has a negative impact of OVER 5%", and makes no sense to jump to. This was because of the efficiency already inherent in the HyperTransport bus, according to him.
He talked for about 5 minutes on the issue, and the gist of it was that until DDR2-667 specifically started to become more affordable, the incremental speed boost didn't make any sense for anyone, including and users and AMD Proc Support.
Incidentally, he also mentioned that DDR2 would (of course) require significant redesign in the built-in memory controller of the 939 chips, unless registered memory was used. This sorta implies in a friday morning-drove-all-night-from-NJ way that the current 939's would not support DDR2 if there were to be 939 mobo's with DDR2 support.