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

Article Vaporware

[ortcutt]

So, Slashdot is now referring to articles which will be up tomorrow?

DDR2?

[TubeSteak]

I thought DDR3 was the future?

I read that it is expected late 2006/early 2007 and Samsung claims it'll be 2x the speed of DDR2 and it'll operate at 1.5v (less power consumption).

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

Re:DDR2?

[DrMrLordX]

DDR3 is the future, and some were speculating that AMD would leapfrog DDR2 completely and go straight to DDR3. Apparently, DDR3 supplies, availability, and prices aren't yet in the range for AMD to push it as their supported memory type in desktops.

DDR2 has some drawbacks that make it less attractive for AMD platforms than even DDR. However, it should be noted that AMD has recently announced that socket AM2 will launch at DDR2-800 speeds rather than the initially-planned speed of DDR2-667. This increase in memory clock should negate most of the latency concerns surrounding DDR2 vs DDR. Should.

Re:Where are the FB-DIMMs?

[Firehed]

While definately worth considering, I'd imagine DDR2 will have enough life in it - at least on the desktop segment - for this to not really be a huge issue. While the idea of needing to buy a new motherboard every time is a bit irritating, you'd have to anyways, unless you have crazy soldering skills. Couple that with the fact that by the time you're ready for a memory type upgrade that once-brand-new processor is probably quite out of date, it's not a huge issue. I recently picked up a two gig kit knowing full well that DDR2 for AMD was on the horizon, and I'm not all that bothered. Chances are I'll bump it up to four at some point next year, and hold off on a new processor (and thus new memory) until quad-core chips are available. I figure that an overclocked dual core chip should hold me over for at least the next year, and I'm not too worried about graphics upgrades as I think PCI-E is going to be around for just as long as PCI, if not longer (thanks to it's future-resistant nature; just add more lanes and you have more bandwidth). In fact I heard rumors a while back that AMD might try to incoprorate a PCI Express controller onto the die as well (leaving basically... what... ethernet and storage interfaces on the chipset?), but seeing that PCIE gains more bandwidth by adding lanes rather than being clocked higher, it seems like it's just moving costs around. While it would probably help consumers in the long run, it's irrelavent to this; point being that moving the memory controller from the northbridge to the processor die actualy increases the speed at which it communicates with the rest of the system. In fact, I'd wager that architectural difference between a P4 and A64 is making the largest difference in terms of overall performance.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of using FB-DIMMs since it would just mean changing out the motherboard and not also the processor, but with the relation between processor and memory interface, I don't see it as being a big issue. Especially considering the fact that DDR2 is available and about equivalent to DDR in prices (about $150 for a 2x1GB DDR400 or DDR2-533 matched pair, as of two seconds ago at Newegg), whereas FB-DIMMs are unavailable right now and will probably start off pretty expensive compared to what's out.

Re:Socket?

[be-fan]

AMD hasn't changed sockets just for kicks. The 754 to 939 transition was to add extra pins for the dual-channel memory controller. The AM2 socket transition will be to add support for DDR2 memory. These things required not just extra pins, but extra traces on the motherboard. Moreover, the traces have different timing characteristics because of the change in memory type. So even if AMD had used a socket with extra pins, old motherboards still wouldn't have the right lines to connect them to.