AM2 doesn't look worth the wait?

james.miller · 28 Mar 2006 at 22:03

they havent so far, and it's very near release date now.

juno_first · 28 Mar 2006 at 22:44

The Conroa will run around 2.6Ghz per core which maybe around 7000 MIPS per core, making it slower than a 2 year old BARTON 3000/2.1Ghz when running single core stuff.
I know multi threading software is improving, though not fast enough I thinks.

It would be nice to have 4x fx57 cores running on one chip with 1000Mhz DDR2 (dream dream).

Efaws · 28 Mar 2006 at 23:31

Its all good

Socket 939 prices will drop like a brick - better value for money

And when people do switch, DDR2 will be much more widespread and advanced, and possibly better than 939 on DDR

so hopefully itll be better after we've had a year of cheap powerful CPUs

Pr0t0c0L · 30 Mar 2006 at 14:18

am2 will feel like a celeron D when conroe comes out

Sigg · 30 Mar 2006 at 14:23

Why does everyone think that socket 939 prices will fall?
When socket A was discontinued prices went up (considerably)
AGP cards are more expensive than their PCI-E counterparts....

NathanE · 30 Mar 2006 at 14:28

juno_first said:
The Conroa will run around 2.6Ghz per core which maybe around 7000 MIPS per core, making it slower than a 2 year old BARTON 3000/2.1Ghz when running single core stuff.
I know multi threading software is improving, though not fast enough I thinks.

It would be nice to have 4x fx57 cores running on one chip with 1000Mhz DDR2 (dream dream).

Umm, what? Conroe slower than a 2 year old Barton?! Where do you think up this stuff?

Bookime Wood · 30 Mar 2006 at 14:44

When is conroe released?

sja360 · 30 Mar 2006 at 15:51

Bookime Wood said:
When is conroe released?

dont mean to be cheeky but if someone answers that then this thread will have gone from AM2 CPU -> Intel Conroe questions

The $6m Dan · 30 Mar 2006 at 16:14

I can't see any of these low latency modules that people are talking about.
The lowest 2GB kit I can see is 4,4,4,8 and that's only at 675MHz effective. Those timings increase to 5,5,5,12 at 800MHz.

Luckily I don't need to upgrade the CPU for a while and with this being one less thing to tempt me, I feel my money is safe. At least for the time being.

manveruppd · 31 Mar 2006 at 14:55

I'm really sick of AMD's constant platform changes. I've been planning to upgrade from my Socket A system sometime later this year, and the plan was to originally go for a low-end S939 CPU that won't be significantly faster than my current 2.2GHz one and slowly work my way up to the fastest ones as they get cheaper. But with AM2 it sounds like there's not that much life left in the socket and there won't be any CPUs significantly faster than the ones in existence now. OTOH jumping on the AM2 bandwagon is undesirable as any new platform is bound to have teething problems until the chipset manufacturers get their act together - think of how long it took us to arrive at the NForce 2 for the Socket A or to get reliable NF4 motherboards with PCI-E and either Crossfire or SLI for S939. And does anyone remember the problems with the memory controllers on the early A64s?
So either I upgrade when I planned to but restrict my upgrade path for the future (making the upgrade of dubious value), or delay my upgrade until AM2 has been sorted out and established.
Seriously though, Socket A lasted for years, and then AMD started releasing a new socket every 18 months on average. Why are they doing this to us?

james.miller · 31 Mar 2006 at 15:41

intel are doing the same mate, they are no different. Actually they are releaseing new chipsets on the same socket just to support new cpu's. So depending on how you look at it, its either slightly better or slightly worse than AMD.

crazyswede · 31 Mar 2006 at 18:31

Has AMD not talked about adding L3 cache to the new AM2 cpus to help against ddr2 memory?

m3csl2004 · 31 Mar 2006 at 19:03

l3 wont help at all

Cyber-Mav · 1 Apr 2006 at 10:52

am2 is preparing the front line for the multi core cpus. more cpu to memory bandwidth is going to be needed when faster multi core cpus come out and quad core will deffo benefit from the faster speeds of dd2 ram. and low latency ddr2 ram is now beginning to surface.

Dunky · 1 Apr 2006 at 19:32

The $6m Dan said:
I can't see any of these low latency modules that people are talking about.
The lowest 2GB kit I can see is 4,4,4,8 and that's only at 675MHz effective. Those timings increase to 5,5,5,12 at 800MHz.

Crucial's Ballistix stuff has quite low timings. 3-3-3-10 for DDR2-533 and 3-3-3-12 for DDR2-667 according to their site.

ted34 · 1 Apr 2006 at 22:50

PinkFloyd said:
I still think AMD are hiding something.
AMD other than releasing the dual cores havent had any major architecture changes recently. Its possible that they may have just kept it quiet, just image the blow that Intel would take if they released Conroe thinking they are comfortably the best.
Then out of nowhere AMD release something seriously special.

-can always hope anyway

No way - we would know about this. Amd is too big a company to silence all its employees and intel and amd are bound to have spies in each others companies

I'm really sick of AMD's constant platform changes. I've been planning to upgrade from my Socket A system sometime later this year, and the plan was to originally go for a low-end S939 CPU that won't be significantly faster than my current 2.2GHz one and slowly work my way up to the fastest ones as they get cheaper. But with AM2 it sounds like there's not that much life left in the socket and there won't be any CPUs significantly faster than the ones in existence now. OTOH jumping on the AM2 bandwagon is undesirable as any new platform is bound to have teething problems until the chipset manufacturers get their act together - think of how long it took us to arrive at the NForce 2 for the Socket A or to get reliable NF4 motherboards with PCI-E and either Crossfire or SLI for S939. And does anyone remember the problems with the memory controllers on the early A64s?
So either I upgrade when I planned to but restrict my upgrade path for the future (making the upgrade of dubious value), or delay my upgrade until AM2 has been sorted out and established.
Seriously though, Socket A lasted for years, and then AMD started releasing a new socket every 18 months on average. Why are they doing this to us?

This is true as soon as am2 is released the prices will be high and there will be probs and so be best to wait a couple of months for bios and driver tweaks before comitting to it + by the look of it i think most of us are going to move over to conroe which could be intels escape goat back into the market which amd have dominated so much recently

matt100 · 2 Apr 2006 at 00:19

I dunno if anyone is bothered but speaking from experience of having some ddr2 4300 which was rated 3-2-2-8 (in a 2 x 1gb pack almost a year ago so it's hardly a new thing).. and some crucial ballistic which were the bog standard 4-4-4-12..

they both overclocks like absolute nutters and kept their timings.. I had the 3-2-2-8 stuff at nearly 600mhz which was way over its rated speed.

I have no view or axe to grind over AM2/conroe etc, its just my view that AMD have moved to ddr2 because they have to.. simple fact is intel drive the cpu market and intel have moved to ddr2.

oh yeah and I'm glad someone picked up on the fact that if s939 ceases production prices will go up just like agp cards/socket a cpus and socket 478 cpus have.

monkeypants · 2 Apr 2006 at 00:23

matt100 said:
I dunno if anyone is bothered but speaking from experience of having some ddr2 4300 which was rated 3-2-2-8 (in a 2 x 1gb pack almost a year ago so it's hardly a new thing).

Bwahahahahahah

matt100 · 2 Apr 2006 at 00:35

monkeypants said:
Bwahahahahahah

silence benefactor

monkeypants · 2 Apr 2006 at 19:57

matt100 said:
silence benefactor

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