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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."
and will publish benchmark results as first as a first impression of the new Socket and processors tomorrow.
Nice to see the Editors are living up to their name.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
So, Slashdot is now referring to articles which will be up tomorrow?
1) Publish story about fancypants new platform being delivered to reviewers
2) Reveal that the benchmarks won't be available until later
3)
4)
5)
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7) Dupe!
(Actually 4-6 are also duplicates)
FB-DIMMs should be available by now. If I would go out and buy a socket M2 processor, I'd have to buy a new socket and processor when FB-DIMMs came out (or the switch to DDR3 or whatever). If we had FB-DIMMs then one processor would work with DDR/DDR2/DDR3/SD/whatever just by switching out the memory since the interface is serial and built onto the memory chips. It would allow the life of boards to be extended much longer. Look how long PCI lasted. If you bought a new motherboard in the PCI era and you could keep using it all the way up to now because the socket stayed the same and the memory modules just changed (even though the physical pin out stayed the same) you could do it. Now that PCI-Express is here, we could do that easily for the future.
FB-DIMM is supposed to simplify the board layout too since you don't have to run all those parallel data/address lines to each DIMM. This is supposed to make layout much less complicated. Imagine how many pins would be needed on an Opteron if they wanted to put 4 memory banks on the processor instead of the 2 they have now. That would be a few hundred extra pins. With FB-DIMM that might be one hundred extra pins.
The only need to update the socket would be to provide additional power pins (you could future proof this a bit by putting extra power pins on) or other features (I've heard of someone, Sun perhaps, trying to put Ethernet on the processor die).
I like AMD, but isn't it time we get past these custom memory interfaces for each standard?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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...
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
What's the point in using the same socket if your old processor won't work with it anyway? Changing the socket keeps people from thinking wrongly that they can use an incompatible processor with the motherboard in question.
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.
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.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'd rather read the AnandTech article on AM2
Being sort of a slow news day, I tried something different and actually read TF "article", as there were no comments featuring "in Soviet Russia" yet posted. First off, SPONSORED LINKS are evil and annoying.
I see the blurb mentions introduction of 6 dual core & 2 single core chips, and I wonder if this will be the new product tier differentiating mechanism: dual and single. Traditionally, we'd see the low end, which was the crippled version of the mid-range, then the high end typically added more cache and un-crippled SMP abilities. Perhaps the low end will be single core, mid-range dual, and high end w/larger caches & 4/8-way ability.
Now that the MHz "wars" seem to be behind us, it's a race to pack multiple cores onto chips, which I see as a good thing. I've always had a thing for SMP rigs (my current & previous boxes are duals), and dual-core going mainstream means several good things for us SMP freaks, the least of which is more affordable 4-way boxen!
In closing, I'd like to mention that this whole blurb about a story (which is in fact an ad vehicle) which references a yet-to-be published story, is rather silly and bizarre. And poorly written. Like my post.
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.