up comming dual cores

[tuckan]

I have been trying to find out if the new dual core chips are going to work with todays mobo's. I know that AMD is sticking with the socket 939. But will the chipsets and BIOS support the dual cores. I haven't read a ton of reviews on the dual cores but so far I haven't seen a diffinative answer yet. It seems from what I have read the answer will be yes but still unsure. I know that to do the upgrade you'll need the S 939. But the question is will the chipsets and BIOS support the dual cores. Does anybody know of any reviews I can read to get the answer?

 

[kirbyrj]

I'm 99.9% sure there won't be an issue with current chipsets because as far as I know, Nvidia, Via, Sis, ATI, and anyone else making s939 chipsets don't have anything on the drawing board specifically for X2 processors. New chipsets with dual cores was more of an Intel problem this time around.

 

[F i L]

Some of the dual cores will be supported with a bios update.
some others won't.
cause some of them will need ddr3(high end catagory) and some of them will need ddr(low en catagory).

 

[Ice Czar]

Im berry berry happy the AMD elected to employ a clear upgrade path with my 940 board
(considering its an AMD chipset of course... )
most chipsets in 939 Id imagine would also get support they want as much adoption as they can get
But unlike Intel theyve attacked the topend servers and workstations first inorder to errode Intels market share some more

the two strategies hold dangers for both companies, Intel stands to loose more share in SMP platforms, whereas AMD is going to have a hard time competeling on the desktop by putting off the dualcores there, since they are going to be behind on the desktop when they eventually do role out, Id think they wouldnt want to compound that with forcing the adoption of a different chipset, but

It looks as if AMD is going to skip DDR2 alotogether and go straight to DDR3
Im not sure if that can be accomplished solely through the on-die memory controller in the CPU or not, if not then yes a new chipset is likely, Im not overly familiar with single processor AMD64 chipsets however, in the typical SMP hypertransport chipsets higher memory support I think is a gimme

so no definative answer from me but hopefully a few leads

 

[Erasmus354]

Some of the dual cores will be supported with a bios update.
some others won't.
cause some of them will need ddr3(high end catagory) and some of them will need ddr(low en catagory).

ummmmmm.....no

The upcoming dual cores are all socket 939, and all use DDR. Also they will all work in current motherboards, but some motherboards may require a BIOS upgrade, thats all, to support dual core.


As to people saying AMD is going to skip DDR2 and go straight to DDR3 with socket M2 (coming out mid 06). Well that is merely speculation and hopes on the parts of some AMD fans. It is much more probable that AMD is going to be using DDR2.

 

[Ice Czar]

as one of the weekend newposters for [H]ardOCP
Ive seen two credible insider news stories that make skipping probable
I linked one last weekend
Steve linked one this week


Strategically it would be a good move IMO and a way for them to regain thier foothold in the enthusisast desktop sector, it makes sense to me in light of their current strategy to concentrate on SMP, meaning they are going to be behind and have seen considerable market errosion in the desktop, so its a way of regaining a percieved advantage with a desktop dualcore release

Im just an old marketing spin doctor
but thats how Id read it

 

[F i L]

Amd have seen that the ddr 2 dosn't benefits too much so she is going straight to ddr3.
With the socket 1204 dual cores will need ddr3.

 

[Erasmus354]

I'd be willing to bet that AMD will go DDR2.

Skipping ahead to new and unproven technology, while it could pay off is risky. And frankly AMD cant afford financially to go DDR3 and have it fail like RDRAM did. By the time M2 comes out DDR2 will have matured and will actually be able to offer gains. Besides the fact that a processor takes a long time to design, and AMD has probably already decided to go DDR2.

 

[(cf)Eclipse]

Im berry berry happy the AMD elected to employ a clear upgrade path with my 940 board

haha, that made me laugh

though there's no reason to change the chipset for a new memory interface, the two don't have anything to do with eachother anymore

 

[ashmedai]

I'd be willing to bet that AMD will go DDR2.

M2 is currently listed as using DDR2 but there's talk of it using something else. I'm assuming that if something better is available in sufficiant quantitites, they're open to going with that instead.

Also given that a couple core upgrades have featured memory controller improvements, that part of the design is sufficiantly modular as to be easily updated without significantly affecting the core's overall design.

 

[Ice Czar]

though there's no reason to change the chipset for a new memory interface, the two don't have anything to do with eachother anymore

thought that was the case, but when Im not positive I slip into qualifying my statements
been caught out far too many times

besides now that Im an admin Im supposed to be infallible

 

[Erasmus354]

haha, that made me laugh

though there's no reason to change the chipset for a new memory interface, the two don't have anything to do with eachother anymore

You still need a new motherboard though...and unless I am speaking out of my ass (which would explain the smell) didn't AMD need to increase the pinout on the socket M2 in order to support DDR2?

Also to Ice_Czar : http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=898714

nyeah nyeah, I told you AMD wouldn't skip right to DDR3


ok sorry about that, 5 year old moment over.....please dont ban me!!!!

 

[ashmedai]

nyeah nyeah, I told you AMD wouldn't skip right to DDR3

Was a nice thought while it lasted. Sounds like they might spec 667 as a minimum though since that's where it starts being useful...there's up to 800 out now that I've seen. Hopefully by the time M2 comes out, even higher speeds will be common.

 

[robberbaron]

Amd have seen that the ddr 2 dosn't benefits too much so she is going straight to ddr3.
With the socket 1204 dual cores will need ddr3.

Apparently M2 going to be a 940 pin socket. It's keyed differently than the S940 we know.

It may eventually use DDR3, but it will definately have DDR2 first.

 

[(cf)Eclipse]

You still need a new motherboard though...and unless I am speaking out of my ass (which would explain the smell) didn't AMD need to increase the pinout on the socket M2 in order to support DDR2?

yup, new mobo for the socket, but the chipset should stay the same unless AMD changes to the new hypertansport spec, and makes it incompatible with what exists now.

 

[Ice Czar]

ok sorry about that, 5 year old moment over.....please dont ban me!!!!

LOL well so much for being infallible

and my ban hammer only whispers in my ear for the blood of spammers
(and g0atse of course)

 

[hardwarephreak]

To speak to the original question...and a quick clarification.

I believe it has been referenced (by AMD) that any motherboard that supports the 90nm core Athlons will work...I am trying to think of 939 boards that don't...can't think of any, but I believe that was the only stipulation.

DDR2 or DDR3.
AMD's dual cores are starving for memory bandwidth, the Pentium D is a bit better off but not by much (plus it is languishing away riding the old Front Side Bus ).

I think the questions that will be asked are...

Will the DRAM manufacturers be sampling DDR3 in the fourth quarter this year, and what do the initial yields look like.
There have been some articles here lately where some manufacturers are talking about how good DDR3 is looking...

Can/Will the market bear 3 types of DDR (DDR/DDR2/DDR3)?
Hey, as much as they want to...DDR is not dying off as quickly as they want. DDR2, although an Intel only tech (for right now) is starting to see increased speeds and lower prices. Add DDR3 to that? By first quarter 2006?

Will the latencies of DDR2 decrease or bus speeds increase enough to provide the bandwith both AMD and Intel are ideally looking for?
That was the great bitch about DDR2, aside from the cost. High latency made it perform worse than high speed, low latency DDR. That margin would disappear as manfucturers increased the speeds of DDR...which they are...and the bandwidth provided by these DDR2 modules are plenty fast for Athlon X2 or Galatin Dual Core P4s.

How hard is it to include/engineer an new memory controller into the Athlon core?
Hell, I am no chip designer/EE. How the hell would I know

Lastly, AMD will look to what is Intel doing?
This is kind of obvious.

Just my .02

 

[Ice Czar]

AMD's dual cores are starving for memory bandwidth,

well thats dependent on scaling 2 single core opterons on a dedicated memory bus with
DDR-400 modules, and coupled together with a NUMA operating system,
can see peak bandwidth levels of over 10GB/s. damn near impossible to actually employ that.
And with Hypertransport that scales up with the processors. Compared to Intel's chipset memory controllers thats not bottlenecked at all and is a primary reason theyve made such inroads in SMP with plenty of bandwidth to support dual cores.

 

[tuckan]

Thanks all for replying.

I'm wondering now if AMD is going to go with DDR2 or DDR3, will the memory controler on the chip be backwards compatible with DDR. Since DDR2 has a different pin configuration you wouldn't be able to use a current board that doesn't support DDR2. I haven't read on DDR3 but I would think that also would have a different pin configuration. So any board built today with the thought of being able to upgrade just the CPU later wouldn't work with a dual core correct?


On the DDR3 and AMD, I really hope that AMD does a lot of research on it. Someone just spell out RAMBUS to them and see what happens. Intel really flopped on that one. I would hate to see AMD walk down the same road. To many customers come in with Rambus and I hate telling them how much it will cost to upgrade memory.

 

[(313)dnoyeb]

A few things to recognize.

First, I don't know the stats of the upcomming dual core chips

Second, AMD/intel going dual core is a cop-out, and should be viewed that way. This is not an advancement in technology, but a falling flat of technology and reverting to brute force. Cant make 1 go any faster, so lets add 2.

We can only hope that when they add dual cores they want call a 2x3700+ a 7400+ since most people will not see anywhere near the equivalent of such performance

Cache. Large cache is the realm of dual cpu systems. One way to use slower memory would be to increase the cache. So I expect large cache on the dual cores, but if they are putting goo-gobs of cache on its a good bet they will use DDR2. Is the cache size known yet?

 

[Erasmus354]

A few things to recognize.

First, I don't know the stats of the upcomming dual core chips

Second, AMD/intel going dual core is a cop-out, and should be viewed that way. This is not an advancement in technology, but a falling flat of technology and reverting to brute force. Cant make 1 go any faster, so lets add 2.

We can only hope that when they add dual cores they want call a 2x3700+ a 7400+ since most people will not see anywhere near the equivalent of such performance

Cache. Large cache is the realm of dual cpu systems. One way to use slower memory would be to increase the cache. So I expect large cache on the dual cores, but if they are putting goo-gobs of cache on its a good bet they will use DDR2. Is the cache size known yet?

When you are able to design a processor that can run at 5GHz or higher and still compete with a real cpu (none of these stripped down engineering proof of concepts) then you can call it a cop out. The fact of the matter is that the power loss is growing exponentially as speed increases, and the processors are reaching the limits of how fast they can go. Do you call a car that gets better gas mileage a cop out because the manufacturer couldn't get it to go over 300mph so they decided to improve other things? No.

As to the 7400+, if you would read you would know that they are releasing the X2's with the moniker of 4400+ 4800+ etc, not 7400+. And yes the cache size is known. There will be 2 models, one (forgot code name manchester or something maybe?) with 512kb for each core, and the other Toledo will have 1MB of cache for each core.