Kamakazie! said:
Socket A lasted for YEARS. Socket AM2 will also last for years, with a similar upgrade path to what you are asking for, except it will work over 3 revisions and TWO types of memory (you wont get that with intel).
Taking what the article says:
AM2 mobo : AM2 cpu
AM2 mobo : AM2+ cpu
AM2+ mobo : AM2+ cpu
AM3 mobo : AM2+ cpu
And if AMD are good to their word then you would be able to keep the AM2 CPU all the way up till the AM3 mobo. There is a perfect upgrade path for you that looks ahead probably over 3 years and spans 2 types of memory.
But that's no kind of upgrade! You won't get anything by upgrading to an AM3 mobo if you keep your AM2 CPU! You want to be able to buy a single decent motherboard and upgrade to faster CPUs as their price drops! Sure, your average massmarket joe won't even know what the inside of his PC looks like so they'll upgrade the whole box in one go, but your enthusiast WILL want to upgrade to a faster CPU that he couldn't afford a year ago when it was the fastest chip available and was going for >£500! With Socket A, S939, and even Intel's S775, you had a massive upgrade path from the lowest-rated processor on the socket up to its highest. Sure, this is to an extent theoretical, as early S775 boards don't support Conroe, Socket A didn't come in DDR400 flavours in the first wave of mobos so putting in a top-of-the-line XP3200+ would mean it would be gimped if it would even work at all, and even S939 boards had memory management problems early on. It's therefore always been wise to wait for the second wave of boards to give a socket time to mature. Under AMD's roadmap, however, the boards simply won't have the time to do that, as board manufacturers will have to bring out their AM2+ flavours before they've had time to sort out the problems with AM2, and then start working on the AM3s as soon as AM2+ is out! Therefore, AMD is effectively slapping on a £100 premium to each CPU upgrade you do, as you'd need to change boards as well as chips: to not do so would mean you're gimping your shiny new processor by forcing it to run with its latest features disabled.
To add insult to injury, it's the specific features that are of most interest to the enthusiast that will be gimped: split-voltage in AM2+, and HT3.0 in AM3, both of which will presumably be very beneficial to overclocking.
I have high hopes that AMD's future CPUs will be able to give Conroe a run for its money, but their strategy with rolling out a different platform for each CPU upgrade just makes them an uneconomical solution for the medium-term.
