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AM2 slated....

Stelly

Stelly

Stelly

Don
Joined
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A certian magazine has just slated the AM2 and the AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 chips saying, and I quote...

there's no escaping the fact that, clock for clock, a Socket AM2 will be slower the a Socket 939 system, so there is no incentive to upgrade.

In concert with the disappointing debut for the nForce 570 chipset, things aren't looking good for AMD... you'd be mad to buy th FX-62 now, especially as Intel's new Core2 Duo CPU is only a few months away
Click to expand...

Ah well... what do you guys thing? think that they are spot on myself :)

Stelly
 
I'd say they're right too... I mean its been obvious ever since AMD announced/leaked the DDR2 chips that there would be at least some hit to performance. The K8 architecture practically foams at the mouth for low memory latency and when it is taken away it performs badly. AMD should concentrate on prefetching if they ever want to break away from their reliance on the IMC and low latency.
 
I think AM2 is a flop. Every review site was concerned about AM2 way before it was even launched. The whole point of AM2 was to let use "cheaper" DDR2 RAM, but as far as I'm concerned, £372 for 2GB of DDR2 RAM is anything but cheap. That's just ridiculous! AM2 go sit in the corner! :D

Intel have played a very smart game by giving us an early preview of what to expect from their new processors and as a result, we're all waiting for them rather than embracing AM2. It's time for the roles to reverse, AMD are being thrown to the backseat! (And then it might change all over again when K8L or K10 comes out)
 
wait until christmas.
amd are going for 65 nm cores them selves.
i don't know why they have brought out this first batch.
i am going to wait and don't believe the intel hype.
 
Stelly said:
A certian magazine has just slated the AM2 and the AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 chips saying, and I quote...



Ah well... what do you guys thing? think that they are spot on myself :)

Stelly
Click to expand...

Anandtech and FiringSquad both say that there's a slight performance improvement in some applications and games and no performance loss.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2762&p=5

"Thankfully, on final hardware, we're at least not seeing any drop in performance."

In any case, the move to AM2 socket is all about moving to DDR2 and lower power requirements. If you are upgrading a full system and want to stay AMD you'd definately go the AM2 route, or wait for Conroe which looks like it will be performance king for the next few months at least.
 
I admire AMD for going the low power route - esp as they would have known , like everyone else, that there would be little performance gain initially.

as above says, wait for 65nm and hopefully that should show a bigger performance gain and compete with conroe

I just pray that conroe cpu's amd mobos arent priced out of the market because this is where Intel usually let themselves down in my opinion

(albeit premium s939 boards are now getting in the £150+ region which to me is excessive but hey ho)
 
FrankJH said:
I admire AMD for going the low power route - esp as they would have known , like everyone else, that there would be little performance gain initially.

as above says, wait for 65nm and hopefully that should show a bigger performance gain and compete with conroe

I just pray that conroe cpu's amd mobos arent priced out of the market because this is where Intel usually let themselves down in my opinion

(albeit premium s939 boards are now getting in the £150+ region which to me is excessive but hey ho)
Click to expand...

I thought that was because of all the on board stuff that comes on the mboards...

Stelly
 
bestyboy said:
wait until christmas.
amd are going for 65 nm cores them selves.
i don't know why they have brought out this first batch.
i am going to wait and don't believe the intel hype.
Click to expand...

understandable I'm going to see how Conroe really performs... :)

Stelly
 
im planning on keeping my 939 system (gonna get myself an X2 sometime soon) until end of this year/beginning of next year and get myself AM2 65nm with whatever ATI chipset supports them, since nvidia haven't done well with nforce5 IMO, also gonna pair it with direct X10 card (cards perhaps) and DDR2 with the tightest timings i can find, should be a cracking system i would think
 
There's another angle I just noticed and its an area where maybe AMD will make up for with AM2: Basically, anyone building a 'cheap as chips' system can go the AM2 Sempron way as opposed to Celeron :p The same goes for anyone who's moving from XP or 939 AGP, go AM2 (Sempron or Athlon) seeing that there is 'no performance drop'. As for those with 'killer' systems or planning a 'killer' system, simple wait for Intel Core 2 :)

hp7909
 
Stelly said:
I dont understand why AMD would bring out AM2 if its so so so poor? will their next gen of chip on the AM2 socket??

Stelly
Click to expand...
It isn't "so poor". It just isn't any better than the same CPUs (bar the memory controller change) on 939.

That's the point that I think people are overlooking - this is a platform change without new CPUs. Oh, sure, you need an AM2 CPU, so it's new in that respect, but those AM2 CPUs are the same as the 939 ones bar the memory controller. There isn't a new CPU design.

It isn't dramatically different to when Intel went from 478 to 775.

What makes it very different in practice is that this time the competitor has a genuinely new CPU range in the wings (Conroe/Core 2). AM2 won't have the "working in" time that 775 had. People with 939 already have no reason to buy AM2 kit. People who are looking to do an upgrade from older kit or get a new PC will certainly consider waiting for Conroe/Core 2 and making do in the meantime. So why bother with AM2?

AMD need a whizz-bang CPU range for AM2 or a huge price advantage to maintain strong sales in the majority of the market. Otherwise, they are going to lose ground fast. Not only does Conroe/Core 2 look rather good, it's a new design and that means speed increases as production is refined. Athlon64 is not a new design and seems to be pretty close to topping out on speed.

I would normally consider it likely that the next lot of AMD CPUs will be on AM2...but AFAIK the next design is a quad-core CPU and I'm dubious about whether that will just drop into an existing socket.

AMD needs to bring out the K9 design soon and it will need to have some bite.

I couldn't pass up on that opportunity for a cheesy pun.
 
Angilion said:
It isn't "so poor". It just isn't any better than the same CPUs (bar the memory controller change) on 939.

That's the point that I think people are overlooking - this is a platform change without new CPUs. Oh, sure, you need an AM2 CPU, so it's new in that respect, but those AM2 CPUs are the same as the 939 ones bar the memory controller. There isn't a new CPU design.

It isn't dramatically different to when Intel went from 478 to 775.

What makes it very different in practice is that this time the competitor has a genuinely new CPU range in the wings (Conroe/Core 2). AM2 won't have the "working in" time that 775 had. People with 939 already have no reason to buy AM2 kit. People who are looking to do an upgrade from older kit or get a new PC will certainly consider waiting for Conroe/Core 2 and making do in the meantime. So why bother with AM2?

AMD need a whizz-bang CPU range for AM2 or a huge price advantage to maintain strong sales in the majority of the market. Otherwise, they are going to lose ground fast. Not only does Conroe/Core 2 look rather good, it's a new design and that means speed increases as production is refined. Athlon64 is not a new design and seems to be pretty close to topping out on speed.

I would normally consider it likely that the next lot of AMD CPUs will be on AM2...but AFAIK the next design is a quad-core CPU and I'm dubious about whether that will just drop into an existing socket.

AMD needs to bring out the K9 design soon and it will need to have some bite.

I couldn't pass up on that opportunity for a cheesy pun.
Click to expand...

Yes I agree with you there

Stelly
 
i think 939 owners arent worth the move to am2 "YET" but semprons on the other hand i think will do a lot better for it :) i know my mums friend wants a new system and ill be building her an am2 sempron system :)
 
NathanE said:
I'd say they're right too... I mean its been obvious ever since AMD announced/leaked the DDR2 chips that there would be at least some hit to performance. The K8 architecture practically foams at the mouth for low memory latency and when it is taken away it performs badly. AMD should concentrate on prefetching if they ever want to break away from their reliance on the IMC and low latency.
Click to expand...

another ill informed statement.
The A64 architecture has never been as latency reliant as the old XP cores and theres certainly no 'foaming at the mouth'.
Every review i have seen with decent RAM has given a 3-7% speed improvement... hardly a sign of it performing badly.

bit-tech.net said:
AMD's move to Socket AM2 and DDR2 has been reasonably successful. Comparing Socket 939 performance to the performance of a chip with the same characteristics as it on the new AM2 socket, it can be said that there are some performance improvements, but there are also performance deficits in some situations too. We think that it is safe to say that the move to DDR2 brings incremental performance benefits to the K8 architecture.
Click to expand...


HardOCP Review


"Atleast some hit to performance" .... well no, thats completely wrong. OK so its not a bit improvment, but anyone that thought we would see 10-15%, on an architecture that has never been starved for bandwidth, was just kidding themselves.

The fact is, an AM2 based CPU is the fastest thing out there right now. If you can't wait to upgrade, go AM2. 100%.
If you can, then its probably worth waiting for Conroe, although you will have to wait atleast 2 months.


Angilion said:
I would normally consider it likely that the next lot of AMD CPUs will be on AM2...but AFAIK the next design is a quad-core CPU and I'm dubious about whether that will just drop into an existing socket.

AMD needs to bring out the K9 design soon and it will need to have some bite.
Click to expand...

The next CPUs out on AM2 will be dual core 65nm K8 at the end of this year and then there will be dual core K8L out early next year. K8L is looking very good. It certainly has the server people a little excited.
Quad core may never come to AM2, nobody but AMD knows yet.
Oh and there next totally new architecture will be K10, they are missing K9 out because of the name :p

EDIT: Removed a link to Anandtech comparison table already posted.
 
Last edited:
bestyboy said:
wait until christmas.
amd are going for 65 nm cores them selves.
i don't know why they have brought out this first batch.
i am going to wait and don't believe the intel hype.
Click to expand...


Hes got a point..
 
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