AMD Bumps Up Socket AM2 Launch Date

Thrill-Ki1l writes "According to DailyTech AMD has moved up the launch date for their new socket AM2 processors. The manufacturers of the new AM2 chipsets and motherboards have their hardware ready to ship early so AMD decided to launch the chips 2 weeks early. The new launch date is May 23rd."

Re:condolences

[Bin Naden]

I didn't get screwed: I bought the cheapest CPU with a socket 939 motherboard and will buy a better CPU once the prices go down much like 754 cpu went down once 939 came out.

Too many sockets!!!

[Freaky Spook]

Although I find AMD to be better chips, I still stay with intel because their chips are all on one socket.
AMD at the moment offers no upgrade path because their Semprons & Athlons are different sockets, you can't turn a budget AMD box into something more powerfull without replacing the motherboard.

Intel allow people to start with a Celeron and easily upgrade to a P4 or Pentium D if more CPU power is required, I find the upgrade option far better value.

Re:condolences

[bersl2]

How about those of us who dropped not so much cash on such a system?

As long as I catch DDR1 prices at its lowest point (to reach 2GiB RAM total), my Opteron 165 @ 2.49 GHz system should cut it for a while.

Re:Is it really worth it?

[MBCook]

There was an article somewhere recently (Anandtech? Tom's Hardware?) checking performance of DDR2 versus DDR on the Opteron. They determined that DDR speeds below 533 (IIRC) would hurt the performance. At 533, it was about even. As the processor and or memory speeds up then you will see the benefit. This isn't strictly necessary right now. I think it was actually due to the latency issue that you mentioned that this was the case.

I'd rather see FB-DIMMs, personally. But the move to DDR2 was going to happen at some point. Better now (when it's not necessary and people can still choose a great processor and DDR combo) then later (when DDR is more expensive and they were hurting for the change).

I seem to remember that was going to be something else with this socket upgrade (in the form of processor features) that was more interesting or offered better performance increases than the memory change. I don't remember if it was SSE4 (is that out yet?), a better branch predictor, AMD's Vanderpool (can't remember the name), or what.

AMD's AM2 processor seems to be DRM-free

[UseFree.org]

Hastening the launch date by a couple of weeks isn't too significant, but AMD certainly deserves to be congratulated for (apparently) leaving DRM out of their AM2 microprocessors. In contrast, Intel has succumbed [slashdot.org] to RIAA/MPAA pressure and betrayed their customers by stuffing Treacherous Computing [gnu.org] down their throats.

I'm also happy to see that AMD has not put DRM into its AMD Live! [amd.com] technology, which competes with Intel's DRM-ridden Viiv. I'm sure AMD is taking a lot of heat from the entertainment cartel [downhillbattle.com] for not handcuffing users, and I hope they'll continue to keep their products DRM-free.

And let's not forget that AMD has been supportive of LinuxBIOS [linuxbios.org] by actively ensuring that their motherboards can run it [fsf.org].

That old link?

[John Jamieson]

Fine, and I can show you an article that says the 65nm Athlons will clock 40% faster, and the conroe is actually slower if you don't fit in the 4Meg L1 cache. (anyone can add cache)

Why don't we wait 6 months and then start trash talking, when we have actual products.

One of two things has happened
1. AMD has become complacent and has no strategy of really updating a now old product this year. In this scenario they were lulled asleep.
2. Intel has stunk so bad that AMD has been holding some cards close to the chest because it did not need to play them.

No staged demo by either AMD or Intel will give us the answer, but we will know in 6-8 months.

Re:Way to go Apple!

[ClosedSource]

"It's pretty funny to see the UNIX-hating, Intel-hating Mac zealots of the world to have converted within a couple of years into pro-UNIX, pro-Intel zealots that talk like Apple invented UNIX and the x86."

Are you sure its not just UNIX fans' imagination that Mac zealots have become pro-UNIX? It seems to me that Mac zealots like whatever Apple makes, they don't care much about the underlying technology as long as the user experience is good. I seriously doubt that long-time Mac users are getting excited about the OSX command line interface.

Memory Capacity?

[Bill Dimm]

I may buy/build a workstation soon that will need the capability of holding a large amount of RAM (say 32GB - calculations requiring a lot of memory but not a huge amount of CPU) at some point down the road (I can probably put off fully populating the memory for a while). I came across this post [aceshardware.com], which seems to say that motherboards for DDR2 will allow more DIMMs (16 2GB sticks is a lot cheaper than 8 4GB sticks right now, at least for DDR). It is talking about DDR2 with Opterons. Is there a launch date for DDR2 on Opteron? Is the capacity actually greater with DDR2? Is DDR likely to become scarce down the road, causing DDR2 to be a cheaper option for future expansion? Any opinions are appreciated (I haven't had an excuse to buy hardware in a long time, so I haven't kept up on such things).

Sidenote: Yes, I am aware of the iWill DK88 [iwill.net] (16 DIMMs DDR) - anybody have any experience with it (especially with Linux)?

Re:Too many sockets!!!

[Saeger]

Not once has it made sense to upgrade the processor.

Usually you'd be right that it makes no sense to upgrade the CPU in leu of building a completely new system around it, HOWEVER one CPU upgrade that does make a significant difference for a lot of people these days is going from single to dual core -- if your motherboard supports it (via bios upgrade or not).

I just upgraded from a uni AMD64 3000+ -- that I built with my MSI Neo4 Platinum system a little over a year ago -- to a dualcore AMD64 X2 3800+ (best bang/buck) and the difference in FEEL is night and day no thanks to the small GHz bump. This was the first time I've bothered to replace a CPU on the same motherboard in over 10years of building my own systems. socket 939 might be end of life, but a dualcore upgrade is a worthy exception.

AMD socking it to Intel

[mikesd81]

It sure looks like AMD is socking it to Intel with the lawsuit and now this release.

It doesn't help either that HP/Intel's Itaniums aren't taking off and the AMD Opterons are doing well. Plus, as others have mentioned, AMD seems to backing Linux pretty tough. And I was looking @ alot of embedded devices and I see more AMD based ones than Intel.

It's interesting how far AMD has come in the last 10+ years.

Re:Is it really worth it?

[hattig]

Just a FYI as you might be interested, Anandtech today did another Opteron vs. Xeon test, this time with 8 cores per machine, 4 sockets.

The 2.6GHz Opterons stomped on the 3.0GHz Xeon MPs by around 30-40%.

Article [anandtech.com]

Woodcrest (Conroe based server part) will have the same bandwidth restrictions that hurt Xeon in the above test. Expect to see the usual suspects test four socket Woodcrest with cache intensive benchmarks.

However they're not a large part of the market really.