Am3+ is dead after...

M

maxius

2[H]4U
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Dec 17, 2001
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STEAMROLLER'S 28nm BOOTY

yes folks it looks like am3+ is going to have a life after piledriver.

http://hexus.net/tech/news/mainboard/45889-amd-looks-standardise-sockets-am3-fm2/

"What wasn't known up until recently, however, was that AMD intends to stick by the AM3+ socket for at least one more major processor iteration, which is highly likely to be Steamroller."

2nd source http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2208525/amd-sticks-with-socket-am3-for-steamroller

This just locked my upgrade path for next year...
 
steamroller will finally match thuban IPC? I suppose that will be a decent upgrade once overclocking is factored in.
 
buttons said:
steamroller will finally match thuban IPC? I suppose that will be a decent upgrade once overclocking is factored in.
Click to expand...

Piledriver will outperform Thulban... Steamroller will be very close to the post ivy vag cpu haswell
 
maxius said:
Piledriver will outperform Thulban... Steamroller will be very close to the post ivy vag cpu haswell
Click to expand...

Don't hold your breath, remember how Bulldozer was supposed to be so damn great? :D
 
I guess I'll go with an 8350 after all but the question remains where is DDR4 in all this?
 
DDR4 isn't expected to make an appearance until 2014 at the very earliest.
 
i wish intel would do this stick whit one socket, how many sockets has intel went though since amd been on am3?
 
Time to upgrade and max out the memory! Wish I could find some reasonable DDR2.....but I guess the upgrade was inveitable.
 
This is good news, I suspected that steamroller would be AM3+
Might hold out till then as PD looks like a modest update. SR should add a good step up in performance with a small die size and lower thermals.
 
AM3+ died after Thuban, but I guess allegedly it will be revived? I certainly hope so and not at the expense of running a part at 1.21 jigawatts.
 
Yeah AM3+ is to stay until Steamroller-based processors are released. After that, it's too early to tell what socket is going to be used for Excavator and beyond.

With DDR4 standard finalized, a new socket would not be surprising. The nice thing now is that if Excavator moves onto DDR4, AMD may finally have quad-channel memory for the first time for non-server customers.
 
Melon said:
Don't hold your breath, remember how Bulldozer was supposed to be so damn great? :D
Click to expand...

What do you mean exactly?

wqwzcz.png


Anyway, good news for socket AM3+, but i fear that current motherboards will not be able to support all features of Steamroller...
 
del42sa said:
what features ?[/QUOTE

I don't know what features they may add. Power management possibly. On my AM2+ board, you couldn't disable turbo on 1090T without losing Coon N Quiet. My AM3+ board can do that. Or my AM2+ boad had no option for LLC. Just an example.
Click to expand...
 
tunatime said:
i wish intel would do this stick whit one socket, how many sockets has intel went though since amd been on am3?
Click to expand...

Yes. It's caused me to hold off on an upgrade. Now that I finally did (2600K, 1155) I'm sticking with it for a lot longer. I don't want to jump into the new socket. The upgrade path for me is new MB and CPU. It's hurting them in the long run. Rather than me going out and buying a new CPU to upgrade, I'm waiting another generation or two before going all out for a new MB/CPU.

AMD is doing it right for people that want to upgrade easy. Performance isn't matched with Intel (yet), but I have to give them props for keeping everything simple and low cost. I wouldn't mind going AMD if their CPU's could match Intel performance...
 
octoberasian said:
Yeah AM3+ is to stay until Steamroller-based processors are released. After that, it's too early to tell what socket is going to be used for Excavator and beyond.

With DDR4 standard finalized, a new socket would not be surprising. The nice thing now is that if Excavator moves onto DDR4, AMD may finally have quad-channel memory for the first time for non-server customers.
Click to expand...

i suspect amd's prediction 3-4 years for single socket for fx - apu may be more of a 2 year transition... excavator may bring us ddr4/unified socket for fx and apu's
 
i love the idea of a single socket, triple channel should provide enough bandwidth for both IGP's and enthusiast class CPU's

however - back to today:

AMD, it's lovely that AM3+ will be sticking around, and i'd love to have a 4GHz 8350, but i won't go near any of your enthusiast CPU's unless you provide me an enthusiast platform to use it with.

1. PCIe 3.0
2. native USB 3.0
 
Good news to me. I like my 8150 and its been fun overclocking and Im sure Ill enjoy overclocking my 8350 as well. Best of all I love the idea of not having to replace my beloved Sabertooth!
 
R3MF said:
i love the idea of a single socket, triple channel should provide enough bandwidth for both IGP's and enthusiast class CPU's

however - back to today:

AMD, it's lovely that AM3+ will be sticking around, and i'd love to have a 4GHz 8350, but i won't go near any of your enthusiast CPU's unless you provide me an enthusiast platform to use it with.

1. PCIe 3.0
2. native USB 3.0
Click to expand...

Well, native USB 3.0 won't be exclusive to Fusion chipsets (A70M, A75) anymore as that will come with the 10-series chipsets-- 1070 and 1090.

As for PCI Express 3.0, that's an entirely different issue. Someone in that Techpowerup article stated it's an issue with HyperTransport itself-- bandwidth limitation. I think that's only partly the reason there isn't a PCIe 3.0 yet in an AMD chipset. The other reason was something I read a few years ago: AMD sees no added benefit to PCIe 3 since PCIe 2 was not even saturated or fully utilized bandwidth-wise. However, tests on [H] and other places show PCIe 3 does benefit-- even if only a little-- in multi-GPU setups because of the extra bandwidth provided for 2 or more graphics cards. You're only looking at anywhere between 5 to 15 FPS extra if I recall just by moving a multi-GPU setup to PCIe 3.0. And, the number of computer users using multi-GPU setups is quite less than those with just a single video card or integrated ones for that matter. Again, current computer market decides everything-- where most of the money is. If multi-GPU setups were probably more affordable or available, and less prone to issues in certain games, it'd probably be more widespread and necessitate a move to PCIe 3.0 sooner than later.

It would explain why AMD's Trinity APU dropped HyperTransport completely and uses PCI-Express 3.0 to directly communicate with external I/O devices. Something like that implemented in AMD FX processors would probably require a new socket as much of the processor aside from the memory interface is used for HyperTransport to external I/O and the northbridge.

And, since Socket AM3+ is going to be retained until Steamroller, I would not be surprised Excavator will come with a new socket, DDR4 RAM, and native PCI-Express 3.0 on the processor. That's probably the time I'm thinking that AMD is moving towards a single socket design for its APU and FX processors, or a unified FX-APU variant. (That's if going by the rumors. roadmaps, AMD's supposed intentions for desktop computing, and whatnot that's published in the past few years.)
 
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Not to mention, the speed improvements with PCI-E 3.0 are really only applicable to top-tier PCI-E 3.0 enabled cards. Cards like the 670/7950 and up, not lower end cards.
 
Tsumi said:
Not to mention, the speed improvements with PCI-E 3.0 are really only applicable to top-tier PCI-E 3.0 enabled cards. Cards like the 670/7950 and up, not lower end cards.
Click to expand...

Yup.

Lower end cards won't even saturate the bandwidth of PCI-Express 2.0 and it'd be sorely underutilized on PCIe 3.0. When you're pushing a lot of data to the screen at a high resolution with all the eyecandy turned on, that extra horsepower from [multiple] higher tier cards, the extra bandwidth from PCI-Express 3.0 will help-- even if just a little.
 
What Ive said elsewhere about Vishera (the next launch of CPUs, Piledriver is just the name of the cores/arch used).
Its basically BD with a 10-15% increase in performance per clock. Trinity is based on the same thing thing but cut down a bit. Trinity offers almost PHII level single threaded performance, so we can only hope/assume this is faster then that, and should either equal or be slightly behind PHII in single threaded. But can clock 15-25% higher, giving it the advantage.
Click to expand...

Then as for AMD's single threaded performance,
BD put AMD equal to PHI in single threaded, which came out in 2008 (4 years old). Vishera should put them back to PHII levels, which came out in 2009 (3 years old).

Intel's Haswell comes out late this year, or early next year, which should be performance king for at least a year. So that puts AMD's newest/best at least 4 years behind what Intel has.

A 3570K for $200 at stock will beat whatever AMD has even with a modest overclock in most instances. The only place AMD can keep up is when something uses all 8 "cores".


That said, at least this will be a move in the right direction. Its just they need to find away to catch up on 4 years. Back with PHII they were only two years behind, and BD put them back another two.
Click to expand...


Sticking with the same socket for steamroller is actually bad news. Yes it makes for an easy "upgrade", but it also means the CPU architecture wont be far beyond whats being used now. Its going to be limited to what the platform can do.


SATA is the first thing that needs to be replaced. They can go to SATA4 and double the speeds of SATA3 again, but the first release of SSDs will be bottlenecked again. Someone needs to make a new standard, and let SATA go the way of IDE.

DDR4 isnt remotely needed. I have a 2011 system, and there is no difference running quad channel 2200Mhz cas 10 vs dual channel running 1333 cas 11. Sure the bandwidth increases, but nothing actually takes advantage of it.

Currently, the only way to run PCIe3.0 is with Ivy Bridge on Z77, which runs 8x8 in dual card situations. Which is the same as running PCIe2.1 on 16x16, which means there is no advantage yet for it.
 
tunatime said:
i wish intel would do this stick whit one socket, how many sockets has intel went though since amd been on am3?
Click to expand...



Too damn many! One of the things that has always frustrated me about Intel is how often they change sockets, often times having multiple ones for each generation. They pretty much make motherboard manufacturers full of glee, and now mobo manufacturer's are crying about Haswell further making them insignificant.

One thing I've always been jealous of AMD lovers. Not all of us have $500 to plop down for an upgrade just because they have to throw down on a new mobo.


/grumpy Intel Enthusiast.
 
Liger88 said:
Too damn many! One of the things that has always frustrated me about Intel is how often they change sockets, often times having multiple ones for each generation. They pretty much make motherboard manufacturers full of glee, and now mobo manufacturer's are crying about Haswell further making them insignificant.

One thing I've always been jealous of AMD lovers. Not all of us have $500 to plop down for an upgrade just because they have to throw down on a new mobo.


/grumpy Intel Enthusiast.
Click to expand...

When a single Intel generation outperforms 3+ AMD ones, is say your getting more than your money's worth. Then you look at the track record. AMD keeps the same socket but makes very marginal improvements or goes backwards in performance.

You might say SB>IB was marginal, but surprise surprise, they're on the same socket.

If AMD is keeping the same socket, that tells me that they are unable or unwilling to make a competitive processor because history tells us it will be marginal.
 
R3MF said:
i love the idea of a single socket, triple channel should provide enough bandwidth for both IGP's and enthusiast class CPU's

however - back to today:

AMD, it's lovely that AM3+ will be sticking around, and i'd love to have a 4GHz 8350, but i won't go near any of your enthusiast CPU's unless you provide me an enthusiast platform to use it with.

1. PCIe 3.0
2. native USB 3.0
Click to expand...

1. PCIe 3.0 is utterly pointless and provides no real world benefits
2. native USB 3.0 amd has had this many moons before intel.
 
who cares about pci-e for graphics? Pci-e is needed for those boards with x1 slots and newer sata/sas controllers.

Also: Although sata3 is 6gbit/s, sas has already moved on......http://www.lsi.com/solutions/Pages/12GBS.aspx

pcie- 2.0 x1 is what, 250M/second each direction IIRC? A single SSD for $80 can eat all the bandwidth of the slot
 
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octoberasian said:
As for PCI Express 3.0, that's an entirely different issue. Someone in that Techpowerup article stated it's an issue with HyperTransport itself-- bandwidth limitation. I think that's only partly the reason there isn't a PCIe 3.0 yet in an AMD chipset. The other reason was something I read a few years ago: AMD sees no added benefit to PCIe 3 since PCIe 2 was not even saturated or fully utilized bandwidth-wise. However, tests on [H] and other places show PCIe 3 does benefit-- even if only a little-- in multi-GPU setups because of the extra bandwidth provided for 2 or more graphics cards. You're only looking at anywhere between 5 to 15 FPS extra if I recall just by moving a multi-GPU setup to PCIe 3.0. And, the number of computer users using multi-GPU setups is quite less than those with just a single video card or integrated ones for that matter. Again, current computer market decides everything-- where most of the money is. If multi-GPU setups were probably more affordable or available, and less prone to issues in certain games, it'd probably be more widespread and necessitate a move to PCIe 3.0 sooner than later.

And, since Socket AM3+ is going to be retained until Steamroller, I would not be surprised Excavator will come with a new socket, DDR4 RAM, and native PCI-Express 3.0 on the processor. That's probably the time I'm thinking that AMD is moving towards a single socket design for its APU and FX processors, or a unified FX-APU variant. (That's if going by the rumors. roadmaps, AMD's supposed intentions for desktop computing, and whatnot that's published in the past few years.)
Click to expand...

that is likely all very true, but does nothing to take away from the following:

"i won't go near any of your enthusiast CPU's unless you provide me an enthusiast platform to use it with."

i upgraded every two years, i am overdue an upgrade now (discounting the new GPU), but amd is intent on producing anything that interests me until Excavator in 2015!
 
Liger88 said:
Not all of us have $500 to plop down for an upgrade just because they have to throw down on a new mobo.
Click to expand...

You can usually reduce the cost by selling your motherboard for around $50 less than you paid for it 2 years later. Provided it is working well and you did not pick up one of those crazy $375 boards in the first place..

Edit:

Although I admit there is always a gamble to sell your items on places like eBay since a buyer can easily claim the product is not working or damaged and demand their money and shipping charges back.
 
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I haven't swapped out a mobo without changing the cpu and vice versa a lot lately. Socket 1366 and i7 920 have given me more longevity than buying any recent AMD platform. Things kind of lose there value proposition when you "upgrade" to stuff that can now sniff the farts of the competition. I might be upgrading soon, and obviously the only choice to my old 920 @4GHz is another Intel.
 
texuspete00 said:
I haven't swapped out a mobo without changing the cpu and vice versa a lot lately. Socket 1366 and i7 920 have given me more longevity than buying any recent AMD platform. Things kind of lose there value proposition when you "upgrade" to stuff that can now sniff the farts of the competition. I might be upgrading soon, and obviously the only choice to my old 920 @4GHz is another Intel.
Click to expand...

Kinda makes you wonder, sure AMD has not had a lot of progress, but Intel has not provided a really good gaming upgrade that is able to get a solid victory over an overclocked 920, that model is from from 2008, sure it requires a personal power plant but it is still going strong.
 
I have a Bulldozer 6 core upgrading to Piledriver would just be for braging rights really no point for me anyway.
This is great news = ) =) =)
 
tunatime said:
i wish intel would do this stick whit one socket, how many sockets has intel went though since amd been on am3?
Click to expand...

Can you please expand on that AMD sticking to one socket ?

As an ex owner of Thuban X6 and 890GX AM3 non plus mobo I'd love to hear about it.
 
maxius said:
Piledriver will outperform Thulban... Steamroller will be very close to the post ivy vag cpu haswell
Click to expand...

Keep on dreaming.

Every indication we have thus far is that Piledriver is faster than Bulldozer at the same clock, yet still slower per core than Thuban...

The only way Piledriver is going to beat Thuban is by clocking much higher, and I haven't seen any idnication that it will be able to.

I still expect that in a fully overclocked comparison (Thuban at 4.1Ghz, Piledriver at 4.7Ghz) Thuban will have a slight edge in per core performance. But only a very slight one, not the 5-10% gap we currently see between Thuban and Bulldozer.

Steamroller being anywhere near Haswell sounds like a joke to me, and not a good one.
 
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Michaelius said:
Can you please expand on that AMD sticking to one socket ?

As an ex owner of Thuban X6 and 890GX AM3 non plus mobo I'd love to hear about it.
Click to expand...

It's not identical, but its semi compatible.

If motherboard manufacturers really wanted to they could make AM3 motherboards mostly AM3+ compatible.

More than you can say for Intel completely breaking compatibility with every iteration.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039193603 said:
It's not identical, but its semi compatible.

If motherboard manufacturers really wanted to they could make AM3 motherboards mostly AM3+ compatible.

More than you can say for Intel completely breaking compatibility with every iteration.
Click to expand...

And, Socket 1155 being out for two years now is getting replaced next year with Socket 1150 for Haswell processors.

It's going to be crazy when Haswell-E processors come out in about year after that. The Socket 2011 Haswell-E processors are NOT backwards compatible with the current gen Socket 2011 boards for Sandy Bridge-E and next year's Ivy Bridge-E processors. The reasoning from Intel is because of the architectural and power consumption changes in the Haswell architecture.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039193598 said:
Keep on dreaming.

Every indication we have thus far is that Piledriver is faster than Bulldozer at the same clock, yet still slower per core than Thuban...

The only way Piledriver is going to beat Thuban is by clocking much higher, and I haven't seen any idnication that it will be able to.

I still expect that in a fully overclocked comparison (Thuban at 4.1Ghz, Piledriver at 4.7Ghz) Thuban will have a slight edge in per core performance. But only a very slight one, not the 5-10% gap we currently see between Thuban and Bulldozer.

Steamroller being anywhere near Haswell sounds like a joke to me, and not a good one.
Click to expand...

"Every indication we have thus far is that Piledriver is faster than Bulldozer at the same clock, yet still slower per core than Thuban..."

....in Cinebench.
 
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