Conroe

[dark_omen]

so i guess ill wait for concore(ill have to get an intel mb) or just upgrade for cheap when am2 comes out. you know get a nice 4800 X2 for like 300 somethin. wish FX prices would just fall down to at least 400 somethin. Do you think high end x2 and Fx will keep up with this new intel chip? I also hear opterons are good.

 

[Curry Viking]

so i guess ill wait for concore(ill have to get an intel mb) or just upgrade for cheap when am2 comes out. you know get a nice 4800 X2 for like 300 somethin. wish FX prices would just fall down to at least 400 somethin. Do you think high end x2 and Fx will keep up with this new intel chip? I also hear opterons are good.

You may get it cheaper, but whats the point when you can get a cpu that beats an overclocked FX-60 for $316 (I thinks thats the price of the 2.6ghz conroe.) Its time for people to stop being fanboy's of AMD and start to being fanboy's of the best technology regardless of manufacturers. Just wait for the benchmarks to come out and decide then.

 

[Nitestick]

AM2 means Socket 939 plus some additions to supposedly increase performance.

no its socket 940 with a different pinout to make it incompatable with current s940 processors/motherboards.

You may get it cheaper, but whats the point when you can get a cpu that beats an overclocked FX-60 for $316

that is the unconfirmed wholesale price not retail price. and that is the price of the 2.4ghz conroe i believe

 

[TheMajor]

no its socket 940 with a different pinout to make it incompatable with current s940 processors/motherboards.

It's not socket 940. It has 940 pins.

 

[Nitestick]

true the technical name is AM2 but you can't tell me its not s940.....its is only the pinout has changed. most sockets were defined by pin count so why not call this s940? there are two versions of s479 that differ by the location of a single pin.

 

[MrCoffee]

Am2 is very similar to 940 but ints not the same, not even the same with a different pin layout. The have been small changes to the core as you know, making it a different socket.
The only reason they changed the pin layout from 940 was to prevent people putting a 940 opteron in there and expecting it to work because it wouldn't (which you also know, so i'm not sure what your point is) .

ON the conroe / AM2 theme, from what I can gather core will have a 10-15% performance advantage over the new AM2 chips but I don't expect that to last more than a few months as DDR2 latencies come down and AMD clock speeds go up along with their shift to 65um.
I expect that by Oct-Nov we'll see upper end AM2s on par with upper end conroes.
Of course by then Intel will start rolling out the tigerton, clovertown etc.. but then a few more months down the line (5-8?) AMD should be rolling out their quad cores which sould be better than their intel counterparts but that remains to be seen.

 

[Green Radience]

true the technical name is AM2 but you can't tell me its not s940.....its is only the pinout has changed. most sockets were defined by pin count so why not call this s940? there are two versions of s479 that differ by the location of a single pin.

FFS, its called Socket AM2 so freakin stick to that. Socket 940 is something totally different from Socket AM2.

The name has Socket AM2 and it has 940 pins. Thats as close as it should come.

ON the conroe / AM2 theme, from what I can gather core will have a 10-15% performance advantage over the new AM2 chips but I don't expect that to last more than a few months as DDR2 latencies come down and AMD clock speeds go up along with their shift to 65um.
I expect that by Oct-Nov we'll see upper end AM2s on par with upper end conroes.
Of course by then Intel will start rolling out the tigerton, clovertown etc.. but then a few more months down the line (5-8?) AMD should be rolling out their quad cores which sould be better than their intel counterparts but that remains to be seen.

The performance increase is more like 30%-40%. No AM2 line of chips will be touching the Conroe. You have to factor in the price too. Sure, a FX-57 right now is maybe on par with a 1.8 GHz Conroe, but the 1.8GHz Conroe is 1/5th the price of the FX-57. Its going to stay the same way.

AMD is moving into the Megahurtz wars again. There are planned 3.6 and maybe 3.8GHz Athlon 64s (don't ask how). A 3.8GHz Athlon 64 is probably like a 2.6Ghz Conroe. Now check this out; At release, there will be a 2.66GHz Conroe retailing for $525-or-so. Now factor in the price of a 3.8GHz Athlon 64, then factor in how much time it will take until a 3.8GHz A64 actually comes out, and you see my point. Intel isn't sitting on it's butt either. For the price of that 3.8GHz FX-60, there will be a 3.33Ghz Conroe. Its probably going to come out earlier than the 3.8GHz A64 too. So AMD will never really catch up with Intel this refresh. AMD fanboys will have to wait until K8L (H2 2007) to see anything big happen with AMD. Until then, the rest of us, fanboys of performance as we call ourselves, will be wallowing in the glory that is Conroe. Watch, in a year, everyone on this forum, including fanboyist Nitestick, will be sporting Conroes. With the ridiculously low prices, you can't resist it.

Just clearing up some misconceptions.

 

[MrCoffee]

Well its almost certain from the way things look that my next machine will be a conroe, but where do you get that performance metic from? 30-40% is shifting some serious a$$ in the processor market these days.
Even Intel (from what i've read) only claim 20% but thats on top of the current A64s. DDr2 will give the athlon perhaps 5-7% and the higher frequencies should push the chips the rest of the way no?
Admittedly the AM2 chips aren't cheap:

The 64 X2 DC chips will cost $671 for the 4800+; $601 for the 4600+, $514 for the 4400+, $417 for the 4200+; $353 for the 4000+; and $323 for the 3800+

but I hear that the core chipsets will make for more expensive mobos?

 

[Green Radience]

30-40% is shifting some serious a$$ in the processor market these days.

You're quite right, and thats exactly what Conroe does. It is, after all, "Intel's new superbaby." Yea, intel claimed a 20% increase, but real-world performance has been FAR above that. The thing is, most of the benchmarks out there show the Conroe beating something like a FX-57 or FX-60 by quite a bit, so we can only guess the clockspeeds at which they would MATCH. That figure is in the 30%-40% range.

DDR2 is a controversial issue. From the looks of it, it isn't giving ANY performance increase at all. The A64 architecture is designed in a way that it isn't memory bandwidth-hungry. Intels have traditionally needed a lot of memory bandwidth to make up for not having a Integrated Memory Controller (IMC), thus the DDR2 speeds. AMD doesn't need that, so the additional bandwidth with DDR2 doesn't really improve the performance. 5%-7% increase would be a dream come true for AMD right now, but doesn't look like its happening.

What you hear about the chipsets is likely a distorted version. Right now, at this second, when Conroe isn't out yet, the only motherboards that will support Conroe are Socket LGA775 motherboards, but there's a catch. They have to have the Uber-High End 975X chipset. Only $200+ motherboards support this chipset, so its somewhat *ahem* stupid to buy one at this point. As the Conroe release date looms closer, there will be lower-end chipsets released for low-end motherboards. You'll probably be seeing everything from crappy $50 motherboards, to the mainstream $100 motherboards, to the High-end $250 motherboards.

 

[MrCoffee]

DDR2 is a controversial issue. From the looks of it, it isn't giving ANY performance increase at all. The A64 architecture is designed in a way that it isn't memory bandwidth-hungry. Intels have traditionally needed a lot of memory bandwidth to make up for not having a Integrated Memory Controller (IMC), thus the DDR2 speeds. AMD doesn't need that, so the additional bandwidth with DDR2 doesn't really improve the performance. 5%-7% increase would be a dream come true for AMD right now, but doesn't look like its happening.

Hmm I'm not so sure of that, Are you looking at the benchmarks of early samples or something?

Benchmarks