A First Look at AMD's M2 Platform

Knight Thrasher writes to tell us that Tom's Hardware has an interesting first look at AMD's AM2 platform. From the article: "While Intel will be answering later this year with its Merom/Conroe processors, AMD officially says that the introduction of its AM2 platform and DDR2 memory support in the second quarter of this year will be able to maintain its current lead. Unofficially, we know that AMD will launch six dual-core and two single-core AM2 processors on June 6 - later than initially expected but well in time for Intel's Conroe, which will be introduced in September. Tom's Hardware got its hands on a stable engineering sample of an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ for Socket AM2 and will publish benchmark results as first as a first impression of the new Socket and processors tomorrow."

Comments

Re:DDR2?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know NVidia is already using it on video cards...

nVidia is using GDDR3 which is based of DDR2 and has nothing to do with DDR3 (reference).

Re:DDR2?

[MBCook]

Video cards are always ahead because of the high bandwidth they need, and more importantly the lack of compatibility. Each time you release a new video chip, you can just change the pin out and add as many pins as you want. You don't have to keep using the same exact pin out for 5 years so that users can upgrade their processors.

Speaking of which, how many normal consumers actually DO upgrade their processors? Maybe we should move back to the soldered on processors of the past. No socket to be stuck to, no expensive ZIP socket to put on the board (you can't tell me that 940 pin ZIF sockets are cheap), not much downside (if your CPU dies, most people would just buy a new and faster computer today for the price to get the thing repaired).

Re:Socket?

[ortcutt]

Socket 940 Processors use ECC, registered DIMMs. Socket 939 processors use unregistered DIMMs. So, making the processors different by one pin keeps people from using a processor in a motherboard which won't work with it.

Anandtech

[Gogo Dodo]

I'd rather read the AnandTech article on AM2

Re:Ahhh yes

[Gogo Dodo]

Well... I'll give the /. editors a break here because the linked article says exactly what the quoted text says. So one could blame the editors over at Tom's Hardware.

This is nothing to complain about

[Dr. Spork]

I don't know how many socket architectures Intel has introduced in the last two years. I just stopped caring enough to count. AMD, on the other hand, has basically standardized on one: 939. They deserve a lot of praise and respect for the fact that 939 runs everything from (almost) the bottom of the line to the very top, which is a big range, covering at least eight distinct core designs.

Nobody believed them when they said that they won't make you buy a new mobo to upgrade to dual-core processors. Amazingly, AMD kept their promise! They even migrated some Opterons to 939 so you can upgrade your home computer with a real server chip. Now compare this to Intel and you'll see how disciplined and customer-friendly AMD have been.

Of course, they want to make use of DDR2, and since your old motherboard doesn't have DDR2 slots, you'll need to buy a new motherboard to use DDR2. That's the end of the story! You'd have to be high to think you could keep your board and just upgrade to DDR2. AMD switched the pinout a tiny bit so that you don't make the mistake of plugging in an incompatible processor into the board. There's nothing more to it than that.

So maybe people are complaining about being forced to go to DDR2, but I don't think that will happen. I'm quite sure there will be several new AMD processors for Socket 939, probably priced at the same level as their AM2 counterparts. The only difference will be the memory controller. Of course, it won't make much sense to buy 939, with DDR2 being almost as cheap as DDR.

Maybe people were complaining about the extra burden on mobo manufacturers to retool, but this is absolutely minimal, as the Anand article makes clear. We will see many cheap AM2 boards almost right away, because they are so similar to Socket 939 and 940.

Really, this is a great illustration of how a socket change should look.

Re:DDR2?

[ericmarshall]

I know NVidia is already using [DDR3] on video cards...

Not quite.

The memory on the nVidia cards you are talking about is actually GDDR3, not DDR3. The name is similar, but the technology is not.

From the Wikipedia DDR3 article:

The GDDR3 memory, with a familiar name but an entirely dissimilar technology, has been in use for several years in high-end graphic cards such as ones from NVIDIA or ATI, and as main system memory on the Xbox 360. It is sometimes incorrectly referred to as "DDR3".