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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."
If your competitor has a better marketshare and also a better line of processors, it would be a suicide to not release a competitive product when the economy is staggering. Withholding the technology while waiting for the economy to improve can make the gap between them and Intel even wider.
Face your daemons!
The latency is generally lower than DDR2, measured in wall-clock time. The advertised latency appears worse only because of the faster clock.
Or a lot of small-budget husbands :P
You may be able to put a am3 processor in a am2+ motherboard, but the Register says that am2+ processor in a am3 motherboard will not work. (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/02/09/review_cpu_amd_phenom_ii_am3/page2.html)
To quote: ..
"makes life horribly confusing as the Phenom X4 920 and 925 and the X4 940 and 945 will be identical apart from the processor socket. This means that there is the possibility that some poor so-and-so will buy an AM2+ CPU and an AM3 motherboard when ne'er the twain shall meet."
careful what you buy out there
This is the sort of thing that gets us out of a poor economy.
That's bullshit, CL in periods * period length = latency, and since they are clocked higher the latency will probably be around the same, I won't calculate it for you.
And that latency is how long it takes before you actually start to read any bits, but as soon as you have started each bit will come faster from the higher clocked memory.
If you don't get a speed increase it's because either of:
1) Processor not fast enough to take benefit of additional bandwidth.
2) Cache system smart enough to not take benefit of additional bandwidth.
3) Application not using memory in a fashion where it will take benefit of additional bandwidth.
Most likely the later one ..
All higher end graphic cards come with faster memory, it may not be a huge deal always but it probably add some benefit, rather stupid if it didn't.
AMD said they would skip DDR2 and go directly to DDR3 earlier because there was no benefit when actually in use but I guess they "had to" when Intel was using DDR2 just because people see the numbers and wonder why one is bigger than the other.
Though first AM DDR2 chips vs 939 DDR chips showed no increase in speed in benchmarks.
Anyway, DDR3 is faster than DDR2, will you notice it? I have no idea.
Other than starving CIS majors, who barely earn enough money from their university's computer lab to pay for Ramen Noodles, who does that? IT professionals would just buy all the hardware together because their time is worth more than their money, and everybody else just buys entire new computers. This could only appeal to a handful of small-budget kids.
If you don't think in terms of upgrading the processor of the computer sitting on your desk, but instead think of HP updating the processor in their line of AM2-based computers, then you should be able to see that the appeal is basically universal. This way the OEMs can offer refreshed versions of their lines without having to incur the extra expense of DDR3. Obviously they will also make a DDR3 AM3-based line, but the DDR2-based line will be cheaper.
Backward compatibility and in-place upgrades appeals to far more than a handful of poor hobbyists.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"Despite a poor economic climate, farmers still harvest crops they planted last year...." - come on....
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
So my advice to the married chumps out there is to keep a separate bank account for discretionary purchases which your wives have neither control of nor access to. Life without self-respect (and gadgets) is not worth living.
Seconded. One of the best things you can do is establish the idea of a slush fund for both sides of the relationship; fighting over money is one of the more common reasons for divorce.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The 3-fold clocking scheme will only really help on interleaved burst reads. The memory cells don't charge the output buffers any faster just because you clock them at a higher rate. This is why the nCLK latencies scale with the number of folds in DDR scheme. The only things that will make the cells charge faster are a) higher voltage or b) smaller process or c) a more conductive semiconductor chemistry that lowers resistances and increases currents on the wafer.
If you can have 3 banks of DDR3 interleaved by 1 clock then you can probably see some significant gains on sequential (aka burst) reads. In real life, this doesn't happen very much, especially in a multithreaded environment where almost all s/w is written using high-level foundation classes with very little machine optimization.
Works both ways. You come home with a new CPU & MOBO and install it in the old case when she's not looking; she sneaks a new pair of shoes into the closet and tells you she bought them last christmas on sale when she busts them out.
Or, you can be adults, and maybe agree on an amount for discretionary spending that doesn't require the others approval.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Virtualization doesn't help your performance if you're already using all of a particular resource. It has overheads that mean you're getting less out of your hardware in terms of raw performance. The fact that you can put 5 boxes that would otherwise be sitting idle on the same hardware is what makes virtualization attractive.