AM2? Is it really any quicker than 939!

[Air_Arms]

Getting an AM2 Rig soon and just wondered if there are any real performance boosts (other than DDR2 which isnt a massive one really) Has the architecture changed at all?

Thanks,

 

[Jokester]

There's no real difference between the two to be honest, other than S939 being end of line and AM2 being it's replacement.

All A64 AM2 chips are rumoured to have "Reverse Hyper-Threading" built in and only requiring a BIOS/driver update to enable it but I would be sceptical about it.

Jokester

 

[SiriusB]

There is supposed to be a 5% improvement in perfomance in AM2 over 939. However, the aim of AM2 wasn't to create a faster CPU, just a more efficient one that can use DDR2 memory.

SiriusB

 

[Minstadave]

As said, the performance increase of AM2 currently is small, in future though AMD will introduce their K8-L chips onto AM2 and they will offer a more substantial performance increase.

 

[BoomAM]

As said, the performance increase of AM2 currently is small, in future though AMD will introduce their K8-L chips onto AM2 and they will offer a more substantial performance increase.

I was under the impression that K8L was designed for servers only?

 

[Explicit]

Straight from the horse's mouth:

But the following statement from AMD pretty much confirmed exactly what we expected:

"A fair expectation for performance gain from 939-pin to AM2 is about 1% or more across various application-based benchmarks. That assumes equal model numbers for processors and an equal configuration. This also assumes premium memory is used for each configuration."

Source