What Went Wrong for AMD's AM2? 318
An anonymous reader writes "When AM2 was first announced it seemed like it was going to be a guaranteed hit. After all, this platform would be moving the tremendously successful socket 939 into the future with its use of DDR2 memory, a greatly increased memory bandwidth, hardware virtualization, and a number of exciting new CPUs. Despite everything AM2 had going for it, this includes a dedicated enthusiast base and a tremendous amount of pro-AMD spirit at the time, the new platform has largely been dismissed by consumers. The question now is, what happened? How did AMD go from record growth and being the darling of enthusiasts to having a new platform which failed to impress?"
What went wrong? (Score:2, Insightful)
Core 2 Duo?
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The cost of replacing a 939 system with AM2 doesn't justify the price point.
Article reposted (Score:5, Informative)
--
Before we get started it should be made clearly that despite what people may say, AM2 does make for a capable computer. We took a look at an AM2 build based on an Asus M2N32 SLI motherboard not too long ago and were happy with the system. The disappointment in AM2 is not a result of its failure to perform, but rather the failure to match the performance gains seen in the move to the K8 platform. Our testing has confirmed what the industry at large has found to be true- the move to AM2 should bring performance gains of about 3-10% when compared to socket 939, with an average increase below 5%. This is what we would comfortably call an "incremental" performance boost, but nothing more.
So what happened to AM2? Where did things go wrong for AMD, a company that was on a legendary upswing, during which it could seemingly do no wrong. Even with reasonable pricing, a well-timed release date, and high availability AM2 was unable to take off in a way that was commensurate with its potential.
1. Conroe
An appreciably part of the success of sockets 754 and 939 were due to a colossal blunder on the part of Intel: Netburst. This architecture was kept around since 2001 and was always being improved in piecemeal, rather than simply being replaced. The whole episode was capped off by an unimpressive dual core architecture that was kept alive practically on price alone. During this time (754 came out in fall 2003 and 939 came in early summer 2004) AMD did their homework and put out the impressive but short-lived socket 754 and then 939.
But the landscape was changing by the time AM2's release date was announced. Intel had released its Core architecture and the word had begun to spread about Conroe, what would come to be known as Core 2 Duo. Early benchmarking by a number of hardware sites not only let consumers know that AM2 would be a slight performance increase, but that Conroe would be a dramatic one. By the time AM2 was available Core 2 Duo was one of the most highly anticipated processors of all time and AM2 was the "also ran". There was no way that AMD could compete with Intel's marketing clout, regardless of the performance or previous successes.
2. AM2 is setting up AMD for the future
As good as 939 was, it could only last for so long. AMD had to start to look towards the future, which meant moving to DDR2 memory, increasing the availability of memory bandwidth, launching a platform for improved chipsets and the like. Improvements must be done in stages: Socket 754 brought 64-bit, 939 brought dual core, dual channel memory, and mass acceptance of PCI Express video, and AM2 would bring us DDR2. AM2 may not be terribly exciting, but it is paving the way for K8L, AM3, and AMD's 4x4.
3. AM2 is confusing
Unless you follow the processor market closely, AM2 can be confusing. The naming convention "AM2" or "M2" is much different from 754 or 939 and a little investigation reveals that AM2's socket uses 940 pins. As you may recall AMD has already has a socket 940, it came out along with 754 and was used for Opteron and high-end FX systems. Despite the numerical similarity AM2 and 940 are extremely different and are not compatible with one another. Once consumers get past that they will have to figure out the processor they want, more than a few of which have the same name as their 939 counterpart.
4. 939 was too great
OK, a platform can't perform too well, but the success of 939 meant that in order to top it AMD would have to do bring something really innovative. They were clearly unable to do so (or did not intend to) so most 939 owners were never inclined to upgrade. The strong performance of 939, the availability of cheap processors and great motherboards, and the overclockability of most systems meant that convincing people to upgrade has been difficult. A new system would require a new motherboard, memory, and a CPU in the very least, possibly more if the user was upgrading from a
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they're cool running, very stable and debian etch runs like a charm on them (I had to fiddle a bit to get sarge running on them, especially mysql).
Re:Article reposted (Score:5, Interesting)
To add to that, our reliability record for AMD systems is mindblowingly shocking. Having purchased 65 Dual 280 Opterons, we've had problems with ~60% of them.
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I'll agree with that, a lot of the early opteron boxes we bought at $JOB-1 had problems - I think that Tyan rushed out the motherboards in the Black Box Servers and they were not very robust. That said, Black Box Server's build was quite poor too.
Re:Article reposted (Score:5, Informative)
1: Timing - Intel was already releasing chipsets that offered most of the major features that AM2 brought. Namely, that's DDR2 support. Put simply, AMD waited just a little too long to get the AM2 platfor out the door. I remember seeing (very eager) questions about when AMD would be releasing a platform that supports DDR2, but AMD stated - and I'm paraphrasing, here - "You don't need DDR2, yet. See? Look at the performance numbers." While this is true, they missed the perfect opportunity to hit a market at peak interest. As AMD delayed the rollout, interest waned. By the time they brought it to market, it appeared that most of the buzz they generated was gone.
2: Poor release - After telling everyone that they didn't yet need the features that AM2 would have brought them, they failed to re-generate the buzz and interest in the product upon release. Most people I know (myself included) really are perfectly happy with the performance of Socket 939 and DDR. I have no interest in buying an AM2 system mainly because the performance gains I'd get by upgrading nearly my entire system isn't worth it. I suspect that many others feel the same. This attitude is a direct result of AMD's earlier position on the lack of performance benefits of DDR2 and the other new technologies.
In other words, AMD missed the boat with AM2 and they have nobody but themselves to blame. I suspect their teams could feel the consumer anticipation, but just didn't have a product ready to get out the door. And, instead of releasing a half-finished platform, they decided to downplay the seemingly minor advantages until their product was made ready. Adjusting consumer expectations in that manner killed the interest in their newest offerings mainly because it they didn't bring anything new that Intel wasn't offering.
Just my $.02
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I was running an Athlon XP 3200+ box (actually an overclocked 2500+), AGP graphics and DDR memory. It was time for a complete overhaul, and yeah - i guess I could have gone socket 939 and kept my RAM, but I figured future upgradability to K8L was worth the loss (and anyhow I only had 1GB of it, and didn't want to buy more DDR).
This was about a month ago, and Core2 Duos were hard to find, expensive, and the boards even more so. I was looking at a
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I have been Intel free on the desktop since the K6 200Mhz. I have a Core Duo laptop and a Core 2 Duo coming soon. The performance is enough to make me consider j
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Here we have 8 dual-processor server with two opteron 265 each, 2 dual-processor servers with opteron 244. Everything was built by a local integrator using good "made-for-servers" components like tyan motherboards..
These servers are used in different sites, often under suboptimal conditions, some of them had to run with a 35+ C ambient temperature for several days.
We haven't seen the beginning of a hardware problem with any of these servers.
Yes sample is smal
Nothing went wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing.
It is just an evolutionary step for the AMD.
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The only consumers who have a reason to care at al
Re:Nothing went wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not sure if the memory standard isn't a big deal. It probably helped Dell adopt AMD, since they need same memory (DDR2) for Intel boxes, so Dell won't have to have 2 suppliers for memory.
This new memory might help also with quad cores and beyond. Right now the single/dual core AM2 is not bandwith starved (tests give DDR2 an edge of 3-5%), but that might change with quad cores and beyond where HT and faster memory could supply the cores where Intel CPUs might starve with a shared bandwith of 1033 or 1333 MHZ.
Re:Nothing went wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
True, and if AMD had waited with the platform upgrade until memory starvation did become an issue, the newer motherboards would have had a greater advantage compared to the old ones. So, complaining about the incremental nature of the change and lackluster performance increase means complaining about AMD being proactive and adressing the potential problem before it becomes serious.
I suspect some reviewers are a bit bored and are just fishing for hits, because as far as I can tell, if AM2 isnt living up to expectations in some particular fashion, it's the expectations that are off, not the actual hardware.
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I think introducing AM2 would have become necessary anyway, and it was smart of AMD to do it a few months ago while they still had the lead in performance. Pushing such a change to market would be more difficult now, because people have better alternati
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I agree, nothing went wrong. The only point that I think that the article was right on was cost. Since the performance difference between the current generation of AM2 processors and 939 processors is so small (or almost negligible), the average consumer is buying based on price. And since 939 processors and systems are still available, though less "desirable" from being "older tech", the prices ar
Perceved difference (Score:3, Interesting)
AMD is still running their plants at capacity or greater. They are still selling everything they make. If they could make more they could sell more.
The only thing holding them back now is manufacturing capacity. It was nice when they were preceved as being the best, but as long as they can sell everything they make, then they are doing fine.
The biggest problem is price pressure from Intel. And they don't actually have to match Intels price straight out. They only have to ba
The very short summary... (Score:2)
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Besides, it all comes down to performance, and I don't see anybody complaining about the performance of DDR2.
Asked, answered. (Score:5, Insightful)
Question asked, question answered. It failed to impress, and they let Intel jump ahead.
One only has to look at the seesaw video card wars between ATI and NVIDIA to realize the truth. The people who care about such things are a fickle lot. Let one or the other realize a huge gain in performance and odds are that most people--even "loyal" customers--will jump ship in a second.
And if you don't care about such things, then... well, you don't care. So there's no demand, and you might as well have a hamster cage inside the box.
Re:Asked, answered. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Asked, answered. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Brand loyalty can often be because a customer believes in a philosophy of a company's activities. A prime example would be
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With that in mind, I no longer pick my processors or video cards based on brand loyalty.
Congratulations. You've made the very hard jump from consumer to capitalist.
There are other companies, like many GNU/Linux developers, GNU/Linux distributors, and Google, that HAVE done favors for me and that actually warrants loyalty.
Careful. You're slipping.
Three words (Score:5, Insightful)
It just did, really, really, unexpectedly well. It is a good processor and has changed a lot of peoples opinions about the processor market and AMD's (and Intel's) competitiveness. I appreciate the fact that Intel, the top dog, is still willing to put up a fight and compete in price, performance, and power in a market that they already dominate.
Re:Three words (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, that's only two words (and a number).
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64-bit mode, they're not as compelling- and the reviews people are looking at
are with CPUs that have an unholy amount of L2 Cache (And are actually more
expensive for part price and per cycle than AMD's offerings...). It's in the
domain of 4 megabytes of L2 compared to to the best AM2's 2 megs of L2. Of
COURSE it's going to be "faster".
Intel came to the plate with something I'll now consider in some applications-
but is it compelling enough to buy nothing but? Nope. Ri
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If you purchased that recently, you were seriously ripped off. I just bought yesterday a e1505 (Dell Home's twin of Small Business's 6400 with a Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM, the x1300, 15.4" glossy screen, etc for $803.
Either way, I had long been a fanboy of AMD because they w
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Core 2 Duo Happened (Score:5, Interesting)
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ATI can't write drivers, not to mention their almost complete lack of support for anything not Windows.
Oh Woe is AMD! (Score:5, Insightful)
The only major gains AMD are going to make is when they shift to a new 65nm process and then kick off a newer architecture from there.
It's because Vista, 2007, and HD video (Score:5, Insightful)
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Great comment. Lucid, full of common sense and a fine reality check for all those companies who tell us we HAVE to upgrade, when actually our current systems can easily run 99% of what we do.
But seriously, you must be new to post something like this on /.!
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Yup I'm in the same place.Actually I'm a little further behind you even with an Athlon XP 2800 and a crappy old radeon 9000. But if I want to upgrade I have to get a new mobo, new cpu, new video cards and possibly new RAM. That is a major outlay of cash right there. I would love to upgrade my video card right now, but its pretty silly to spend $100 now for a decent one only to have to replace it when I get a board with PCI-e.
When Vista comes out the unwashed masses will rush out and buy a bunch of new ha
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Anything that needs HDMI will not be edittable. HDMI is only necessary to support DRM, not to support any technical requirements of HD and DRM, as its backer's perceive it, precludes editting.
I play back and edit raw HD transport streams on my AGP system all the time and since they have no DRM it
writeup? wtf? (Score:5, Insightful)
well, the article itself answers this question in the first paragraph:
The disappointment in AM2 is not a result of its failure to perform, but rather the failure to match the performance gains seen in the move to the K8 platform. Our testing has confirmed what the industry at large has found to be true- the move to AM2 should bring performance gains of about 3-10% when compared to socket 939, with an average increase below 5%. This is what we would comfortably call an "incremental" performance boost, but nothing more.
By design? (Score:2)
Seems to me that the article was written this way by design. It is (in somewhat silly fashion) regarded as the "upside down pyramid" style of composition. Via [technocrat.net]:
Write in an "inverted pyramid" style. That means that the most important fact goes in the first sentence, then the second most important fact, and so on followed by facts of progressively diminishing importance. This allows the reader to get the most from any story without necessarily reading the entire story. When the facts reach a level that i
hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
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Last thing I've read, the ATI stockholders still have to agree to the deal. Only when that is done and the deal is finalized, AMD will have control of ATI. At that point, I'd like to hear the position of AMD management on Open Source graphics drivers.
VHS vs Beta (Score:5, Interesting)
When you can get a Core 2 Duo E6600 and have it crush an FX-62 and at a fraction of a FX-62's price... It's the same formula as always, price to bang. You get more bang with 939, or go straight to Core 2 Duo.
You could always argue time. AMD folks are used to living a long time on a socket type. 939 was only around about a year before AM2 came, whereas 754 and the previous socket 7 were very, very long lived. In another couple years, maybe AM2/3 will pick up steam, but it's too early.
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Does Intel actually win there? I mean, it's not just the CPU, you need a motherboard that supports it, too. How do the prices of complete systems based on E6600 and a comparable FX stack up?
Re:VHS vs Beta (Score:5, Informative)
Core 2 motherboards start at $46 (Newegg; VIA chipset) and Athlon 64 FX AM2 motherboards start at $47 (Newegg; SiS chipset).
A motherboard with an Intel chipset can be found at $66, while a AM2 motherboard with the nForce 410 can be found for $57.
The cheapest SLI board for Intel costs $78 (rebate). The cheapest SLI board for AMD costs $85 (sale). Their original prices were $97 and $95 resepectively.
LGA775-compatible CPUs start at $45 (Celeron D 326). Dual core CPUs start at $90 (Pentium D 805). Core 2 Duo CPUs start at $180 (Core 2 Duo E6300).
AMD AM2 compatible CPUs start at $41 (Semprom 64 2800+). Dual core CPUs start at $153.
Summary -- Intel motherboards are usually within a few dollars of an AMD equivalent. Budget CPUs start within a few dollars of each other. Intel dual core is cheaper. Core 2 Duo is $27 more expensive than the cheapest AM2 Athlon 64 X2, but faster.
Meaning that that Core 2 Duo E6600 still crushes that FX-62.
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Not so clear cut if you want ECC RAM (Score:3, Interesting)
For reliability, I want my machines with ECC RAM. Looking (for example) at my preferred vendor Alternate.de, I end up with the following prices:
On the Intel side, AFAIK you have to take the pricy 775X chipset for ECC (and some 775X boards are listed as NOT supporting ECC). Alternate prices for boards that actually support ECC RAM are around 200 euros.
As processor, I might take the cheapest Core 2 Duo for 169 euros. No Pentium D please, I don't need
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Has it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially since many online hardware sites tend to be pretty low journalistic standards, and pretty high on drooling fanboyism.
A few main reasons: (Score:2)
- no real performance gain with DDR-2. A simple CPU socket change can't help here.
- CPU core itself hasn't chhanged much. Latest dual core model, like 285 are not that differrent from plain old 240. It has two cores, but cores per se aren't much faster or lower power than old ones...
- People have realised that all technological breakthroughs are aimed at AMD's gain, not customer's benefit. Take HT channels, for example. AMD has been showing them a
AMD is not focussing on the consumer market (Score:5, Insightful)
So now Intel has made a strong come-back on the desktop... and AMD calculates, do we make slices of silicon that sell for $100, or that sell for $1,000 and the answer is pretty clear. AMD does not have the capacity that Intel has, so it's making the most out its fabs by aiming at the server market.
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I don't know if I've seen any benchmarks yet, however.
Easy, two things... (Score:5, Interesting)
2) While DDR2 offers greatly increased bandwidth, it does so at the expense of latency, and in many common applications, doesn't really perform much (if any) better than the 128-bit DDR memory of the socket 939 Opterons did.
When you look at it that way, other than being more "future-compatible", there aren't really any benefits to *most* end users, and if there aren't any benefits, why would they upgrade?
The Athlon64/Opteron chips were popular because they were innovative in useful ways, which gave the end user something more for his money. The AM2 hasn't kept with that tradition.
steve
Re:Easy, two things... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is majorly overrated. What am I missing in my fairly current machine?
1) No Dual-core. Motherboard just won't support it, no matter if you tweak the BIOS.
2) No PCI Express. Last generation AGP port.
3) No DDR2 support (not important unless I could upgrade my CPU to a memory hungrier CPU)
4) Too few SATA ports
5) Too few SATA power connectors
6) No PCI Express slots for expansion cards
7) No eSATA port
8) No SATA II support
9) No RAID5 support
The best future-proofing you can get is the money to buy a machine in the future. Chances are that by the time you're ready to upgrade, all the standards have changed. Unless there's a *very* compelling game that requires a better GFX card than I got coming out in 2007, I expect I'll get a new one in 2008. By then I expect it will have already skipped one generation and go straight for DDR3, DirectX 10 card etc etc.
Platform change? (Score:2)
However, we're about to begin clustering, since load average on the primary application server is approaching 35% (with our growth rate that gives us
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Okay. Either I'm totally confused or you're totally confused.
Unless you're going to do something totally insane and buy an Itanium based system, why does IA/64 come into the equation?
Unless I've totally missed the boat (it's been known to happen), Opteron and Core Duo (and, outside of Itan
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Test? (Score:2)
Then you might want to buy one or two Core 2 Duo machines now and use them for testing.
If all your applications run fine, consider going Intel.
If they don't, you have spent maybe (pulling numbers out of my ass) $2.000 on avoiding a $20.000 error. Sounds like a good tradeoff to me.
I think people missed the point a bit. (Score:4, Insightful)
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This was just a rumor and has subsequently been said to be near impossible. .html [arstechnica.com]
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060713-7263
Sick of pointless upgrading. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a AMD X2 4800 Socket 939 with 2GB of RAM. It does what I want. For me to upgrade to the next level, it's not only a new CPU but new motherboard and new RAM too and that DDR2 stuff ain't cheap if you go for the higher speed stuff to try and futureproof.
Many, including myself, are starting to see the introduction of a new CPU socket type as nothing more than a vain attempt to try and keep revenue flowing by trying to persuade us of all the benefits that these new sockets can offer which apparently the old ones can't. Two downsides to this. The first is ASROCK who have proven that the chipsets are more than up to running new sockets with the help of a low cost adapter to allow you to use the different RAM and CPU. The second is Intel who have come along with the undeniably impressive Core 2 processors that not only run on the existing 775 socket but also the i965 chipset with many boards requiring nothing more than a BIOS update to recognise the new range of processors.
So my message to you, AMD, is simple. We're sick of CPU sockets changing every 18 months. For christ sake, Socket 754 had about 6 months before it was superceeded. Slot A, Socket A, Socket 754, Socket 939, AM2 in less than 6 years with the last three having no real benefit over each other..WE'VE HAD ENOUGH.
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a) Either way I will have to buy DDR2 ram and
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I'm in a similar situation, but I feel very differently. I'll still benefit from getting a dual core CPU and another 2 GB RAM, and adding that to my socket 939 motherboard i
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By the time there's a CPU that makes an upgrade for S939 users worthwhile, I dare say DDR2 (and AMD's use of it; I dare say Quad Core will like the extra bandwidth) will
AM2 vs 939 (Score:2, Informative)
Quad core processors (Score:3, Insightful)
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Simply annoyed with the constant socket changes (Score:4, Interesting)
IMO the best what AMD could do is scrap AM2 and replace it with a socket which is able to plug in 939 (DDR) processors and possible DDR2/DDR4/DDRx processors. Since this will take some time AMD should release any AM2 processor parallel as 939 processors, else AMD will possibly loose some market share.
O. Wyss
AM2 inside? (Score:2, Interesting)
Intel had bit of an advertising coup in that any advert on TV for a company selling PCs (at least in the UK) seemed to have an "Intel inside" logo and jingle played during each ad.
I never saw an "AM2 inside" equivalent.
Hands Down They Got Beat (Score:2)
They lost their "cool" factor (Score:2)
Intel finally did something.... (Score:2, Insightful)
No more bang for buck (Score:3, Interesting)
It was the fact that they used to deliver the substance without the bull and charge accordingly that made AMD so dear to us back then. Not so now - they realized that if people are willing to pay Intel big bucks for fast CPUs, they'd be willing to pay them too. Unlike then - if you want High-end performance today, you gotta cough up some hard cash.
Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't see Cure 2 Duo coming, or perhaps underestimated it, or perhaps yet again just couldn't do any better, as it seems to have caught them pants down.
I just looked up some CPUs for my near upgrade.
For the uber-value dual-core, Intel is practically giving away Pentium D 805's for free - as cheap as the good'ol Athlon XP's, only double the cores.
For the value dual-core game box, The 6400 tears the X2's a new one no matter how you line them up. The price difference - 40$ more expensive than the lowest AMD (AM2 X2 3800). HUGE performance difference. And if it ain't worth the extra 40$, see the first clause above.
For the performance and extreme markets, the 6600 and 6800 tear the X2 an even bigger new one.
This isn't rocket science. It's second-grade math. This round, AMD lose, no matter which side you're looking at (Save maybe the server side, and I'm not sure there too).
Unless AMD either bites the bullet and does some competitive (additional!) price slashing to bring their products in line with the corresponding Intel alternatives, or comes out with something just as kickass to counter the Core 2 Duo, you have to be a certified idiot to be buying their products for anything.
My 2 cents.
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True - Instead, you can now get an AMD chip that delivers almost twice the performance on half the power for the same price as the "comparable" Intel offering.
And I write that not as an AMD fanboy, but someone who
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Ah, and best of all, "And I write that not as an AMD fanboy".
You need to pull AMD's dick out of your mouth and try again. If this was a troll attempt, congratulations, you got me to reply.
* - memory bandwidth and latency is still behind X2s, but I know you don't really care about those "facts"
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The core 2 duo has a TDP of 65W (75 for the "Extreme"). The X2s had 85, then 65, and now a mere 35W, or basically half of the core 2 duo.
memory bandwidth and latency is still behind X2s, but I know you don't really care about those "facts"
Well, considering I mentioned them, you might not want to assume quite so much...
And yes, I called them "abysmal", because they haven't even caught up to the X2, despite having a year and a half since the X2s came out to play catch-up.
I love my AM2! Shuddup! (Score:2, Informative)
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That cinches the deal for me right there, along with AM2 supporting AM3.
Yeah, if you went with 939, there may not be much point in moving to AM2 now. I, OTOH, am sitting here with my Socket A systems, and AM2 and Athlon 64 X2 are sufficiently low in price to be very attractive to me. Is Core 2 Duo better? Yes, from what I've read. OTOH, whichever way I go will be a major improvement on the Sempron 2400+ box sitting before me, and it's not at all clear to me
2 years ago the article would have been flamebait (Score:2, Insightful)
The unanswered question remains, "Is AMD necessary in order to keep Intel honest?"
give it a chance (Score:2)
DDR2 memory still has room for improvement.
When faster DDR2 ram comes out, AM2 will look that much better.
I read it, I didn't learn anything (Score:2)
I have to go with AM2 to use a dual core processor from AMD, right? Or can I use an affordable dual core cpu in 939? And if I can, what do I need
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Nope, the X2s are very affordable in the 939 socket. I'm running a X2 4200 on my main desktop right now, and it's very nice. Honestly, unless you have a specific price restriction, I cannot imagine why you'd buy an outdated socket when similar core duos are very close in price to the X2s. I bought my X2 when Intel's lines sucked. There's no point in br
The CPU *isn't* the performance problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The performance bottleneck is the disk and it has been forever. You want a really fast system today? This is what you need:
http://www.m-systems.com/site/en-US/Products/IDES
320Mb/sec burst rate, 40Mb/sec sustained and key... 0.02ms access time. It's the biggest performance upgrade you can make to a computer.
What Have You Done For Me Lately? (Score:4, Insightful)
AMD put out 3 different socket sets to maximize their profits- socket 754 for low end, non-64 bit computing, and single channel memory, socket 939 for mainstream users, and socket 940 for server and extreme users. All marchitechture, but all forgiven because the AMD users could buy dual cores that weren't just space heaters. Yeah, the price for the good stuff wasn't any cheaper, but the benefits were so obvious that only the Intel/Dell fanboys "stayed the course" or at least, held off from buying.
Then Intel releases a near perfect CPU, great performance, good heat, medium power, just no upgrade to memory acces. Intel fanboys rejoice and finally upgrade. Middle of the roaders feel like they have a choice. AMD is suddenly left in the position it had occupied for all those years, second place. Yeah, it has a lot of options, and is still competitive for server stuff, but it's no longer a lock for the desktop user.
Amd reverts to what worked for them previously- move all desktops to the same socket and give that socket a lot of upgrade life. Since DDR2 is finally available in quanity, and at speeds that actually don't produce a slower OS than using DDR 400, AMD decides to make the change to DDR2. Save for the recent attempt to make money, AMD users have been able to buy one socket for the majority of AMD cpus available at that time, and that provides them some marginal sales, for those users who want a chance at a later CPU upgrade.
SO, socket AM2 is released at a time where it doesn't make much sense to upgrade for AMD fanboys. Intel fanboys are buying all the core 2 duo's their pocketbooks can handle, and middle-of-the-roaders are picking and choosing, just like always, versus performnce and price. AM2 is not cheaper than Intel solutions; the real deals for AMD are the clearance of older socket 754/939 stuff. Any real wonder that AM2 sales, at the moment, have been lackluster? As I see it, AMD took the long view, and released AM2 for the upcoming K8L and newer stuff. They'll take whatever sales they can get, but they aren't overly worried about sales right now. I mean, Dell is finally selling AMD's and I'd bet that AMD is waiting on that cash cow to come in.
Simple answer (Score:3, Insightful)
They choose the best performing CPU for their budget, then maybe the same for a graphics card. Once these two are selected they just chose the memory and motherboard that allows it all to fit together in a stable fashion (or overclock if that's your thing).
Currently if you're looking to upgrade you'll choose a Core based CPU. Once you've got that CPU, it's not really a huge leap of logic to conclude you won't buy an AM2 based board.
It is all about timing and size. (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO:
The reason AM2 "is not a big hit" is because Core 2 Duo is a better processor. It is faster, runs cooler, and priced right. The reason it is faster is because AMD made a couple mistakes.
1) They bought ATI instead of re-tooling to
2) AMD couldn't implement AM2 with DDR3 support so they shouldn't have introduced it at all. The switch to AM2 was needed to consolidated their platform but until DDR3 the move is pointless. The memory makers beleived strong DDR2 sales were still possible because AMD hadn't moved to it yet.
AMD might have known they would loose the competitive edge with these descisions. They can't count on the nForce product; so, ATI was a good direction. Well, it is a direction anyway. For all I know the cost of re-tooling might have been much more expensive.
I have to give Intel props for the new dual core processor. The Pentium Pro was the last good processor they made. Until now that is. Pentium Pro was a fantastic processor. The new one looks every bit as good.
FanBoy Alert!!!
Don't get me wrong. I think the single core version "Core homo" is shit. Fortunately, it isn't as bad as the "Celery"
Re:2 things: price / speed, speed / power consumpt (Score:2, Insightful)
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AM2 is, I believe, the socket type. You know, instead of A,754,939,LGA775 (Intel).
x.xGHz+ is something you made up. They had xx00+, which was used for marketing so people knew what it compared to in an Intel processor, since their processors ran at lower clockspeeds than the Intel competition.
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Anyway, i'd like to know where this article author lives, he claims that he can get DDR rams cheaper than DDR2, while in most places where i'm checking out, it's pretty much the other way around. Whatever x86 i will acquire as next will have a
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Seriously though, it was silly for the car industry and is even sillier for the computer industry. If the car has 4 wheels that are powered, then it's not gonna only have 2 that are on the road. Duh. It's gonna have at least 4. And since there's a positive dearth of consumer vehicles with more than 4 wheels, this is pretty silly. (Dualies don't count since the sets of wheels are connected and act like 1 whee
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To me, as a perl coder, 4x4 means 4444.
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1. Socket 775 CPU
2. Socket 939 CPU
3. Socket AM2 CPU
Now match it with a motherboard
a. Socket 939 motherboard
b. Socket 775 motherboard
c. Socket AM2 motherboard
Its common sense.
Re:2 things: price / speed, speed / power consumpt (Score:2)
I myself own an oldskool Via C3, so I'm not too much into this issue anyways ;) Come to think of it, the Via naming scheme might make sense maybe? At least they have a clarifying list [viaarena.com] :)
Re:2 things: price / speed, speed / power consumpt (Score:5, Informative)
Back in the day if you're shopping for CPUs and come across a P3 933, you instantly had an idea of the chips performance, at least enough to say well that's probably a bit faster then an Athlon 750. I'm sure some nitpicking AMD fanboys will argue and say it wasn't, but lets face it 933 > 750.
Your own example is the very reason that AMD "broke" the naming scheme. It was because idiot consumers like yourself were apparently incapable of making the leap of logic that "clock speed" != "performance." Since Intel was aggressively pushing clockspeed while AMD was pushing the operations per cycle, this would leave AMD at a great marketing disadvantage. So they named their chips with numbers represented the clock speed of the Intel chip they roughly performance-competitive with. In reality, you got what you wanted - numbers that represented performance, not just clock speed.
Re:2 things: price / speed, speed / power consumpt (Score:5, Interesting)
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I have no idea of it's veracity but that's never got in the way of a good rant.