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AMD Launches New Processor Socket Despite Poor Economy
arcticstoat writes to tell us that despite a poor economic climate, AMD is moving forward with a new processor socket launch, although they are trying to make it as upgrade-friendly as possible. "As you probably already know from the AM3 motherboards that have already been announced, AM3 is AMD's first foray into DDR3 memory support. As Phenom CPUs have integrated memory controllers, it's more accurate to say that it's the new range of Phenom II CPUs (see below) that are DDR3-compatible. However, the new DDR3-compatible Phenom II range is also compatible with DDR2 memory. As the new CPUs and the new AM3 socket are pin-compatible with the current AM2+ socket, you can put a new AM3-compatible CPU into an existing AM2+ motherboard. This means that you can upgrade your CPU now without needing to change your motherboard or buy pricey new DDR3 memory."
Because DDR3 memory is so high latency it isn't even worth it. There's no speed increase.
I mean the economy in terms of releasing a product update. If the work is done & ready to go, it's too late to worry about the economy, just ship it. Not only that, product development cycles on these products are long enough that they need to continually invest in R&D regardless of the economy, by the time a just-started project is done, the economy will have rebounded and ready for new product.
If the world is switching to DDR3, that probably means having a new socket. As such, AMD needs to introduce the new socket when they are ready to.
What exactly is the gap between Intel and AMDs CPUs?
(I'm not trolling or trying to start a flamewar, just curious)
Actually we bought drop in CPU upgrades for our Database server, when you have the time invested in the OS and application installs and QA time not to mention tons of ram it's a very cheap upgrade to just swap out CPU's if you are CPU limited. Spending $5K or so to get 40% better performance out of say $300K is sunk cost is a no brainer. Now that's on the Opteron side not the Phenom side, but again if you do a lot of transcoding it's probably cheaper to buy a new CPU then upgrade the whole rig.
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Core i7 940 -> $564.99 + about $250 for mobo = $800+
Phenom II 940 -> $224 + about $150 for mobo = about $375
Core i7 needs DDR3, Phenom II 940 runs DD2 (note that the 940 is an AM2+ part, not AM3 so it doesn't support DDR3). DDR3 is somewhere around 50% more expensive than DDR2 (though falling).
For me, the fact that the i7 is only about 10-20% faster than the Phenom for more than twice the cost, it's simply not worth considering for me. Then again, I do most of my gaming on consoles.
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Your distrust of AMD chips is well-founded; some of the older chips didn't cope so well with a failed heatsink/fan: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hot-spot,365-6.html Modern AMD chips are fine, though. And why the Sempron bashing? My first PC was a cheapo $500 box I built for games. It had a $90 Sempron 64 that beat the pants off of the netburst Celerons out there in games like Doom 3, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, that kind of thing.
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An i7 920 will crush an X2 5200+ in CPU-intensive tasks. http://www.guru3d.com/article/intel-core-i7-920-and-965-review/15 shows a software-based rendering benchmark. The i7's are up in the 11's and 12's, while my X2 6000+ was in the 4's.
The i7 system will definitely cost more, as there aren't really any budget X58 motherboards and the CPUs and DDR3 are still brand-new, top-of-the-line parts (and thus get a price premium). However, I just got an EVGA tri-SLI board, i7 920, and 6GB of DDR3-1866 for $570 + S&H. Yes, that's quite a bit more than your total, but your listed system is actually below my 18 month old system. In my eyes, it's really apples and oranges.
If you can make use of the extra processing power, then I think $570 for an i7 system isn't all that outrageous compared to $260 for the board and CPU you listed, with 6GB of the listed DDR2. For comparison, I paid $575 for the core parts of that system 18 months ago - nF590 SLI board, X2 6000+, 2x1GB DDR2, and 8600GT video card.
If the X2 is good enough for what you want to do though, that's a few hundred bucks you're saving. No sense in buying apples if oranges are acceptable.