AMD Socket-AM2: Same Performance, Faster Memory, Lower Power
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 23, 2006 12:14 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
It's taken AMD almost the entire life-span of the Athlon 64, but Intel is finally on the run. Pick whatever measure of success you'd like, whether it is performance benchmarks, the Dell announcement, or being publicly accepted as a threat - AMD has done it. It's because of AMD's extremely successful uphill battle against Intel these past few years that we've had such high expectations from the company. So when Intel first started talking about its new Core architecture, we turned to AMD for a response that it surely must have had in the works for years, but as you all know we came up empty handed.
Only recently has AMD begun talking about what's coming next, and it will divulge even more information in the following weeks. The problem is that the architectural revisions to K8 that AMD is finally talking about now are still things we will see in the 2007 - 2008 time frame, while Intel's Core architecture is still on schedule to be a reality for 2006. What AMD does have planned to keep itself afloat during 2006 and until the new K8L core debuts is a brand new platform: Socket-AM2.
The long awaited Socket-AM2 platform marks the beginning of AMD's transition to DDR2 memory. If you'll remember, Intel made this transition about two years ago with the introduction of its 925X and 915 series of chipsets. The move to DDR2 proved to yield very little in the way of performance, but it was necessary as Intel was able to drive enough quantity of DDR2 in order to make the cost reasonable today. With DDR2 prices low enough, and availability high enough, AMD was poised to take advantage of Intel's work in establishing DDR2 as a desktop memory standard and support it on a new platform.
In AMD's uncharacteristic silence over the past several months, performance expectations for DDR2 on Socket-AM2 remained completely unset. A little over a month ago we previewed the Socket-AM2 platform and concluded that even when paired with DDR2-800, you shouldn't expect a performance increase from AM2. While AMD didn't publicly confirm or refute our benchmarks, all of its partners were in agreement with the results we had seen. Today, with final AM2 hardware in our hands, we're able to see exactly how far the platform has come in the month since we last looked at it.
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rADo2 - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
K8L is just a marketing, nothing else. Have you seen K8L CPU? No? AMD is about 2x slower than upcomming Conroe, so they have to spread some fud, to keep their fanboys happy...This is the magical performance I am speaking about, AMD cannot come even close:
Intel Conroe @ 3.9GHz: SuperPI 1M - 12.984s
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...ad.php?t=99...">http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...ad.php?t=99...
AMD FX-57 @ 4.2GHz: SuperPI 1M - 21.992s
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=100...">http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=100...
I own X2 4400+ myself (it was a good choice in 6/2005), but within last few months AMD is a very bad choice, as for the price of quite obsolete singelcore AMD you can buy dualcore Intel D930 @ 65nm, and later Conroe. I think only AMD fanboys are buying AMD now, AMD has the worst price/value ratio, and Conroe will only make this gap wider.
Griswold - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
Oh and yea, I run superpi all day long because its such a valuable application that earns me money! :PrADo2 - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
SuperPI tells A LOT about gaming performance ;)mesyn191 - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
SuperPi tells you nothing except how well a CPU runs SuperPi, its not a benchmark.Its also about as in cache and branchless as your gonna get BTW so the performance increases you can get on it by simply scaling clockspeed are impossible as well.
Questar - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
SuperPi is an outlier in Conroe benchmarks.Griswold - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
O rly?Griswold - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
Blablabla...absolsp - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
As suspected, not much of performance gain. Happy with my existing AMD setup.tony215 - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
likewise, I will be sticking with my 939 venice set-up until conroe is released. Even then, I will wait for some more independent conroe test/reviews before going with Intel.Locutus465 - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
After reading reviews of the new chipset offerings from nVidia and ATI, personally I'm glad I'm running an nForce 4 s393 board. Seems to me the new AM2 chipsets and boards are going to need some maturing before they get good. The new solutions were *not* deffinitivly better than what is out there for s939. In fact, nVidia's offering in my opinion was particularly lack luster in terms of actual performance (compared to the older nForce 4 platform).