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AMD Bumps Up Socket AM2 Launch Date

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the scrambling-the-alert-five dept.

Thrill-Ki1l writes "According to DailyTech AMD has moved up the launch date for their new socket AM2 processors. The manufacturers of the new AM2 chipsets and motherboards have their hardware ready to ship early so AMD decided to launch the chips 2 weeks early. The new launch date is May 23rd."

5 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Too many sockets!!! by Freaky+Spook · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Although I find AMD to be better chips, I still stay with intel because their chips are all on one socket.
    AMD at the moment offers no upgrade path because their Semprons & Athlons are different sockets, you can't turn a budget AMD box into something more powerfull without replacing the motherboard.

    Intel allow people to start with a Celeron and easily upgrade to a P4 or Pentium D if more CPU power is required, I find the upgrade option far better value.

  2. Re:Is it really worth it? by MBCook · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There was an article somewhere recently (Anandtech? Tom's Hardware?) checking performance of DDR2 versus DDR on the Opteron. They determined that DDR speeds below 533 (IIRC) would hurt the performance. At 533, it was about even. As the processor and or memory speeds up then you will see the benefit. This isn't strictly necessary right now. I think it was actually due to the latency issue that you mentioned that this was the case.

    I'd rather see FB-DIMMs, personally. But the move to DDR2 was going to happen at some point. Better now (when it's not necessary and people can still choose a great processor and DDR combo) then later (when DDR is more expensive and they were hurting for the change).

    I seem to remember that was going to be something else with this socket upgrade (in the form of processor features) that was more interesting or offered better performance increases than the memory change. I don't remember if it was SSE4 (is that out yet?), a better branch predictor, AMD's Vanderpool (can't remember the name), or what.

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  3. AMD's AM2 processor seems to be DRM-free by UseFree.org · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hastening the launch date by a couple of weeks isn't too significant, but AMD certainly deserves to be congratulated for (apparently) leaving DRM out of their AM2 microprocessors. In contrast, Intel has succumbed to RIAA/MPAA pressure and betrayed their customers by stuffing Treacherous Computing down their throats.

    I'm also happy to see that AMD has not put DRM into its AMD Live! technology, which competes with Intel's DRM-ridden Viiv. I'm sure AMD is taking a lot of heat from the entertainment cartel for not handcuffing users, and I hope they'll continue to keep their products DRM-free.

    And let's not forget that AMD has been supportive of LinuxBIOS by actively ensuring that their motherboards can run it.

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  4. That old link? by John+Jamieson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Fine, and I can show you an article that says the 65nm Athlons will clock 40% faster, and the conroe is actually slower if you don't fit in the 4Meg L1 cache. (anyone can add cache)

    Why don't we wait 6 months and then start trash talking, when we have actual products.

    One of two things has happened
    1. AMD has become complacent and has no strategy of really updating a now old product this year. In this scenario they were lulled asleep.
    2. Intel has stunk so bad that AMD has been holding some cards close to the chest because it did not need to play them.

    No staged demo by either AMD or Intel will give us the answer, but we will know in 6-8 months.

  5. Memory Capacity? by Bill+Dimm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I may buy/build a workstation soon that will need the capability of holding a large amount of RAM (say 32GB - calculations requiring a lot of memory but not a huge amount of CPU) at some point down the road (I can probably put off fully populating the memory for a while). I came across this post, which seems to say that motherboards for DDR2 will allow more DIMMs (16 2GB sticks is a lot cheaper than 8 4GB sticks right now, at least for DDR). It is talking about DDR2 with Opterons. Is there a launch date for DDR2 on Opteron? Is the capacity actually greater with DDR2? Is DDR likely to become scarce down the road, causing DDR2 to be a cheaper option for future expansion? Any opinions are appreciated (I haven't had an excuse to buy hardware in a long time, so I haven't kept up on such things).

    Sidenote: Yes, I am aware of the iWill DK88 (16 DIMMs DDR) - anybody have any experience with it (especially with Linux)?