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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jmke - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
here ya gohttp://www.digit-life.com/articles2/mainboard/ddr2...">http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/mainboard/ddr2...
Xenoid - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
Ok so AM2 is AMD's offering for 2/4 06.The article title mentions same performance, faster memory, lower power. Wouldn't faster memory (in this case, ddr2) net a higher performance than what we're seeing here? Why is AMD bothering with DDR2 if it's not a significant improvement? If the power usage is so low, does this mean we can overclock a lot easier? I never understood the huge deal behind power usage on a cpu.
coldpower27 - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
DDR production is slowing down, and DDR2 is continuing to mature, AMD does need to change to this memory type now, regardless if they like it or not.DDR2 also allows higher capacities, so you can probably reach 4x2Gb now as 2Gb modles are actually available on DDR2.
Considering DDR2 biggest advanatge bandwidth, is what AMD doesn't really need more fo right now, performance improvements will be negligible.
Furen - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Also, having all that extra bandwidth available allows AMD to throw quad-core on the same socket without much problem (maybe 1H07... whatever everyone says I doubt AMD will let Intel have the quad-core advantage for a year, I'd say we'll see very low volume quad-cores as close to Intel's Kentsfield/Cloverton as humanly possible). I know we've heard that AM3 is coming next year (from, who else?, The Inquirer) but considering that the DDR3 spec is not finalized quite yet and just how slowly AMD jumped into the DDR2 bandwagon I'd say we won't see it until 2008 at the earliest.Axloth - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
I think there is also marketing side. There are lots of people "unaware" of ddr1-ddr2 comparison. And they probably think that ddr2 "must" be better than ddr1 because of that that "2". Like: ddr2 is upgrade or next generation of ddr1 so its gotta be much faster. Also, they might go for intel because intel uses ddr2 and amd only ddr1... And they think intel's better thanks to ddr2, disregarding cpu qualities of both amd and intel.pzkfwg - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
If DDR2-800 barely beats DDR-400, I was wondering if the AM2 socket could actually be slower than 939 DDR-400 when using DDR2-667 !?! Knowing that a very large amount of people would buy cheaper AM2 system with DDR2-667, that would be ridiculous!mino - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
YES and NO.Remember most people buy generic CL3 or CL2.5 DDR400. IMHO generic DDR2-666 should be ona par with that.
soydios - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
So, the X2 4200+ will not run the memory at full speed. How safe would it be to overclock from 200x11=2200MHz DDR2-733 (2200/6=366x2=733) to 219x11=2200MHz DDR2-803 (2409/6=401.5x2=803) using OCZ DDR2-800 RAM and an Asus Xpress3200 motherboard?Furen - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
I'd say that you can very likely get away with that overclock with pretty much every 4200+ as long as the motherboard allows you to do it.mino - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Safe as safe. At least from the point it won't blow up :)As for stability it all depends on the motherboard.