Socket AM2 vs. 939

[W1zzard]

HKEPC has a nice writeup that compares the new AMD AM2 CPUs against the existing Socket939 ones. There is also a ton of information material there about details of the socket and architecture.

The article is in chinese but everbody should be able to understand the images and benchmark results.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Keiki]

Seems like AMD hasn't been able to get a tremendous boost for changing to AM2 socket, despite the change from DDR to DDR2 memory.

 

[AsphyxiA]

it dosent really seem like a big difference at all! im gonna stick with socket 939 for now just because hardware will start getting cheaper at least i hope it will also, would the looser timings on the ram have a huge effect on performance? I mean the lowest timing ive seen on a stick of ddr2 was CL3. Once the timings get down to CL 2 if possible, could we see a big boost in performance?

 

[bruins004]

Currently, I wouldnt be able to justify moving from the 939 socket to the new AM2 socket either. I wonder how AMD is going to price this vs. the 939s. It will be interesting to see. If they want to faze out the 939s they will push those up in price, but will they want to do that?

 

[overcast]

it dosent really seem like a big difference at all! im gonna stick with socket 939 for now just because hardware will start getting cheaper at least i hope it will also, would the looser timings on the ram have a huge effect on performance? I mean the lowest timing ive seen on a stick of ddr2 was CL3. Once the timings get down to CL 2 if possible, could we see a big boost in performance?

Timings have an extremely large impact on RAM performance. Frequency isn't everything, intel proved that. Doing more with less, AMD proved that. Why do you think the RAM on graphics cards is clocked down from their rated, because their timings are tightened up.

 

[1Strive]

Translation gives a some what better idea of what these guys are trying to say.

Use Bable Fish to translate. Language = Chinese-trad.

 

[Keiki]

Translations are very vague and hard to understand, better if u just look at the pics.
Anyways, the point of the article is that AM2 socket is very dissapointing.

IMO with Intel pushing out new cpus, AMD has to push out cpus that can compete with Intel's. Now, if AM2 is just like how the article says, then people would be better off buying the new Intel processors. However, AMD can either optimize the AM2 socket so it performs better, or they have to push out a new cpu. Now, I highly doubt AMD will do the latter, because it costs money to develop a new cpu and if they do, noone will buy AM2 cpus. So, the only option for AMD is to optimize AM2 if they fail to do that, for us gamers, Intel may be the way to go.

 

[OneCool]

Yeah,It looks like I will skip this one.I hope the Brisbane core is better.65nm and maybe double the cache,dual crossbars ( so both cores can access memory at the same time) plus lower power consuption.(The 90nm AM2 in those pics are running 1.48vcore) and with the 65nm hopfully scale the core higher and last but not least ramp up the HTT speed