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

Ahhh yes

[OverlordQ]

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.

Where are the FB-DIMMs?

[MBCook]

That's nice, good for AMD. But where are the FB-DIMMs? I like that AMD moved the memory interface onto the processor die and I think it was a great step (Intel is supposed to do this in a few years) but the fact they had to change sockets for DDR2 really bugs me. I understand why, but still.

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?

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).

Anandtech

[Gogo Dodo]

I'd rather read the AnandTech article on AM2