Socket AM2 not as awesome as first expected?

[shocky123]

I hate to be the one to say this..... but according to TomsHardware's latest review of their engineering sample of the AM2 - X2 4800+. Things really arent looking all that great in terms of performance of the new DDR2 chipsets.

Benchmarks against the 939-pin bretheran seem to be almost identical performance wise..

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/21/a_look_at_amds_socket_am2_platform/

I'm not at all surprised honestly... DDR2 really isnt that great for the average user, in fact the article goes as far to say that there may in fact be a performance hit due to the much much much higher timings associated with DDR2 configurations.

Granted, this push is likely geared towards the server/opteron market, as that is the real market for DDR2 systems that can actually exhibit performance increases from the higher bandwidth given by DDR2 memories..

*still waits for the DDR500 support that was promised to be up-and-coming*

Sure it's 'new' for AMD, but it's only opening the door for some 900THz Intel chip to come in and spank the pants off the 'latest and greatest' AMD chip.

read the article, it was quite a good read :)

~Kyle

[zero2dash]

Wow, their forums are full of a bunch of a-holes who think they know everything. :shrug:

It's not really something viable to compare with yet, obviously since (as the article stated) - the test rig does not support DDR2 800 which is most likely where we'll see better performance out of the AM2 setup vs. a socket 939 with DDR400.

This year is going to be full of surprises in the tech field across the board...moreso than years past. Why?

-Socket AM2 debuts
-Windows Vista
-Intel's playing "catch up" for a change
-Apple will (probably) unveil the rest of the Intel Macs including the PowerMac
-two more game systems unveiled at e3 (Revolution and Ps3)

I was already waiting to build another PC...looks like it's for good reason. I'll be waiting to see the performance comparison of the 4800+ X2 with DDR400 vs a 4800+ X2 with DDR2 800 and then we'll see which is the king. And no matter what happens, obviously with new tech coming out - the s939 setups will drop in price, and ram obviously continues to get cheaper...I may end up with a cheaper s939 4800+ with 2+ gigs of DDR400 vs buying the "new gear" (AM2 4800+ with DDR2 800) especially if the price is much lower.

Definitely (IMO) a "wait and see" year we have on our hands. :hihi:

And considering where Intel is...I'm not worried about them spanking anything except themselves. :) Sorry but it's the truth. Even if the AM2 cpus underperform the hype, the fact remains that they still run cooler and take less power (both single and dual core) vs everything that Intel is throwing out there. Intel's also missing the onboard memory controller which also hurts them quite a bit and gives AMD the edge. My point is - I don't see AMD falling off anytime soon. They've built up a few years of excellent design and innovation where Intel has remained stagnant and done nothing except make counterproductive cpu designs and egg cooking temperatures. :heh:

[nate el bueno]

maximium pc says that AMD is payting that company that made RDRAM (whatever they're called) 75 million over the next 5 years to use their patents, which include ddr2. apprently AMD is going to ditch hypertransport and use something that that company (whatever they're called) devealoped in it's place. i have a question though; would ddr2 be the reason that intel tends to win certain tests? (i can't remember which ones, but i think they included photoshop ones)

[shocky123]

maximium pc says that AMD is payting that company that made RDRAM (whatever they're called) 75 million over the next 5 years to use their patents, which include ddr2. apprently AMD is going to ditch hypertransport and use something that that company (whatever they're called) devealoped in it's place. i have a question though; would ddr2 be the reason that intel tends to win certain tests? (i can't remember which ones, but i think they included photoshop ones)

DDR2 is only any 'faster' when you're doing very large data movements, like 100's of MB's constantly, it's technically much slower than DDR memory.
The general reason why Intel chips tend to do well off in the photoshop/image processing tests is simply due to the fact that they have much much much much higher clock frequencies. -- Higher clock frequency means your cpu-cache also has higher frequencies, which is where the majority of the 'calculation' data is held for image processing.
DDR2 wouldnt help that, in fact it'd be much worse than it's DDR brother.

I'm not sure where you heard that AMD was going to drop it's HyperTransport support, I think you may have been misinformed. AMD is actually working on the 3rd generation of hypertransport for use in it's future chips, and it's 2nd gen HT technologies will be likely put on the market in the next year or so. HT is absolutely necessary for multi-cpu systems, and the Opteron, even with 4 cores, will still not be used in a single-cpu situation. HT is here to stay, unless something DRASTICALY better is developed.
(this is however, unlikely because bottlenecks are now caused by memory bandwidth, so there's no need to further develop the HT until the memory issues are worked out)

cool cool,

~Kyle