AMD Moving to a 400MHz Bus? 272
An anonymous reader writes "According to this tantalizing Infoworld Scoop, AMD soon introduce a 400 Mhz bus. Seems that SiS's big announcement at CEBIT is the SiS748 chipset, which supports both 400 MHz DDR & AGP 8X, and is targeted at the upcoming Athlon 3200+."
Yummy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yummy (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you just put your finger on why AMD sales are down. Opteron is so hyped up people are waiting for that. I'd feel sorry for them but I'm also waiting for the opteron before replacing my PC.
Re:Yummy (Score:3, Funny)
I blame:
1) non-gamers/power users don't need a new PC
2) economy sucks
3) Athlon kicked butt when it came out, but Intel came back with some nice, fast chips. And hyperthreading. Mmm, delicious hyperthreading...
4) ???
5) No profit!
Scoop? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe I'm being a little arrogant, but I still feel this isn't really much to be that excited about.
Re:Scoop? (Score:2)
Re:Scoop? (Score:2)
Re:Scoop? (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't find it much more expensive. I recently built a new box and have RIMMs in it (with a PIV-2.4Ghz). It was about 80 bucks for a 256M stick (I bought two). That seemed to be a pretty decent price.
Re:Scoop? (Score:2)
Indeed. I keep reading about new, fast CPUs, getting excited for a few seconds then notice that the CPU utelisation graph on my 1.33GHz athlon hasn't been above 20% for a while and wonder what the point is. I get more excited about separate co-processors for video, audio and encryption nowdays. Most tasks requiring a lot of processing power are not well suited to general purpose CPUs. When did anyone la
architecture (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:architecture (Score:5, Funny)
Gee, good thing you know your metaphors, otherwise you'd be stirring a can of worms by leaving the wrong impression.
Re:architecture (Score:2)
Hee haw!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:architecture (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not just a move to 64 bit. See Ars Technica's article (posted here, yesterday, I believe) for an explanation of some of the other advantages of x86-64... they've taken the opportunity to add some new features and remove some of the old ones that weren't being used anymore.
Re:architecture (Score:5, Insightful)
As to the "whole new architecture"... It's called Athlon64, and it has 800MHz bus (and loads of other improvements). Available in september in a store near you.
Re:architecture (Score:2)
Sir, there not shitting on me (Score:3, Informative)
Re:architecture (Score:2)
So in reality you're saying they've changed the FSB speed twice in about 3 years.
That's not 'constant FSB hikes'
Re:architecture (Score:5, Interesting)
It's called x86-64. The Opteron ships next month.
The current architecture is like milking a deadhorse and they are already running waay too hot.
I did not need that mental image...
Current Thoroughbred and Barton core Athlons don't run all that hot. An Athlon 3000+ runs cooler than a 3GHz P4.
I reclocked my TBred core Athlon XP 1700+ to 8x202MHz (404MHz DDR) on my ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard (Corsair PC3200C2 DIMM). I kept the default core voltage (1.5v). MemTest86 [memtest86.com] verified that it works reliably. Upping the FSB is mostly a matter of motherboard and memory support, not CPU support (outside of being able to adjust the clock multiplier). A few years ago I reclocked a 150MHz Pentium to 1.5x100MHz. Worked just fine.
Re:Did you have any OS install issues? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Did you have any OS install issues? (Score:2)
I'll assume you have a proper power
Who is hottest? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, AMD processors are cooler than the equivalently-performing Pentium 4 chips.
Athlon XP 3000+ max heat: 74.3W
Athlon XP 3000+ typical: 58.4W
Athlon XP 3000+ temperature limit: 85C
Pentium 4 3.06 GHz theoretical max heat: 109.0W
Pentium 4 3.06 GHz thermal design power: 81.8W
Pentium 4 3.06 GHz temperature limit: 69C
What Intel calls "thermal design power" is sort of similar to what AMD calls the "typical" number. It's 75% of the theoretical max temp, so the theore
Re:Who is hottest? (Score:2)
For the complete system numbers, you don't double the difference and add some for the power supply inefficiency; you just add some. The power supply doesn't dissipate 1W for each 1W it provides the system!
So, better numbers: if the Pentium 4 dissipates 23W more than the Athlon XP, and the power supply is 66% efficient, the Pentium 4 system will dissipate 35W more (the extra 12W come from the 66% efficiency of the power supply).
Sorry about that.
steveha
Keep flogging that horse (Score:3, Insightful)
Is a 400MHZ bus really gonna help them all that much? How much more can this chip design take?
Re:Keep flogging that horse (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks to me like they could still have plenty of room to play.
Re:Keep flogging that horse (Score:5, Insightful)
Even with half the stated bus throughput, the Athlon seems to do a good job keeping up with the P4, and at a lower price.
Even at a lower clock rate, the Athlon can beat a P4. The Athlon XP 3000+ has essentially the same performance as a P4 for almost all applications, even ones where you'd expect the P4 to excel at (Video encoding) for example.
It helps that throughput isn't everything - Latency is also important, and the P4 was designed around an extremely high-latency memory subsystem (RDRAM), while the Athlon was designed around a much lower-latency memory subsystem. All the throughput in the world isn't going to help you unless the turnaround between a data request and that data coming from memory is fast. The only exception is if you rearchitecture the whole system (and this includes changing the ISA, which means it can't practically be done for x86) around a high-throughput high-latency memory subsystem. (PS2 is the most valid example - That system is designed around throughput everywhere, and it's designed so that memory latency is a nonissue.)
And don't forget x86-64... That architecture is making me drool. (Forget the 64-bit registers - What's important in the short term is that AMD doubled the number of GPRs and vector registers.)
x86-64 >>>> IA-64
Re:Keep flogging that horse (Score:2)
Re:Keep flogging that horse (Score:2)
> do a good job keeping up with the P4, and at a lower price.
It is also valid to note that the Athlon is at this almost-equivalent level even though Intel's fabrication progress is at least half a year more advanced than AMD. Intel goes through process shrinks six to nine months earlier than AMD. This is a huge advantage, as it means that if AMD and Intel were using the exact same chip architecture, the Intel-fabbed chips would be nontr
Re:Keep flogging that horse (Score:2)
Re:Keep flogging that horse (Score:2)
The PR is a much better indicator, although not always accurate. And when you compare Athlon XP PR's to Intel MHz ratings then the Athlon's beat out Intel in nearly every case - the top of the line is unusual in that the P4 2.8 and 3.06 is actually (slightly) cheaper than the Athlon 2800 and 3000. But for every other processor speed the Athlon is cheaper - often much cheaper. Hell, for the price of a P4 1.8 ($
Re:Keep flogging that horse (Score:2)
Re:Keep flogging that horse (Score:2)
Re:Keep flogging that horse (Score:2)
Re:Keep flogging that horse (Score:2)
Re:AMD Codename Schemes (Score:3, Funny)
'Sylvia' is the initial version with a 400 MHz DDR bus and 512K of cache.
'Jenna' is the second version, with extended SSE instructions and a bus speed jump to 500 MHz DDR.
'Traci' is the big jump to a 800 Mhz DDR bus and a 1MB L2 cache. It makes its debut with the 'Peter' Northbridge chipset along with a Southbridge that has no name, but a very wide bus...
your upgrading argument .... (Score:2)
The downside is.... (Score:3, Funny)
Great news (Score:2, Interesting)
With this 400mhz bus and a bit of upwards evolution, this shouldn't be a problem by the time 970 based macs are released. yay
Question! (Score:3, Interesting)
My CPU is running at 266mhz now, what improvment would I see if I upgraded to a 333mhz bus chip with the same clock speed?
Just curious!
Re:Question! (Score:2)
With the Athlon's architecture, not a whole lot. It wasn't designed with high speed memory in mind. Hell, they started with 100mhz SDRAM. Pentium 4 is better at taking advantage of higher memory bandwidth, but it does help Athlon. If you're building a new system, go for PC2700. If you've already got PC2100, the upgrade might be a waste.
Re:Question! (Score:2, Informative)
But, once you've done that, memory access times will drop substantially for those cache misses, which means about 5% of instructions will execute about 20% faster, so you'll see about a 4% improvement in speed, more or less, depending on how much memory access and IO your application performs.
I think. Somebody flame me if I'm wrong here...
Re:Question! (Score:2)
Not a flame, but your math is off. If 5% of instructions execute 20% faster, then you save 20% of 5%, or 1% of the time. (those 5% of instructions execute in 4% of the time, instead of 5%)
Re:Question! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you do stuff that involves digital video, compiling source code, or other types of activities that actually push the CPU, you might notice a difference between a 266MHz system bus and a 333MHz system bus.
The speed of the front side bus determines in part how fast information can get to the CPU from main memory. If you have fast memory + a fast FSB, you can get your CPU to work pretty darn fast. Your main performance bottlenecks are still going to be memory latency and hard drive access speed, though.
But once information gets from there to the main system memory, if you can keep that CPU at high utilization, you'll notice a pretty significant boost in performance.
It depends. (Score:2)
Apps that operate on large datasets and are memory-intensive will probably see significant improvements. (Scientific computing, maybe video encoding/decoding)
Game engines are typically designed so that the core of the engine is relatively small. Back in the days of the older P2 and P3, Celerons were considered the kings of gaming because of the fact that while their cache size was only half that of their big Pentium brother, the Celerons had full-speed cache while th
Re:It depends. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Question! (Score:2, Insightful)
Hehe..If you're CPU is really running 266Mhz (I'm not gonna pick on your millihertz this time), you'll discover a whole new world with a BUS running faster than your old computer.. All I'm saying is put those old boxes with a nice FreeBSD installed to the closet and use them for screen/IRC-client! Imagine the uptime..
Re:Question! (Score:2)
lol, dang it I didn't think anyone had noticed
I have an old 25mhz machine running in the attic, uptime so far is 658 days and counting. Not that it does much these days, I just can't s
Re:Question! (Score:2)
Re:Question! (Score:2)
> I upgraded to a 333mhz bus chip with the same clock speed?
Do you mean a 266MHz chip with a 333MHz bus? That'd be odd, and such a creature does not exist. You'd probably get a substantial performance boost in data access intensive applications, ones that don't have a small code loop and don't exercise much redundancy. For small loops with lots of redundancy (which is not too uncommon), the caches on your processor offset some of the
I'm already at a 400MHz FSB (Score:2, Insightful)
Already got this luvin :) (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Already got this luvin :) (Score:4, Informative)
[OT] Re:Already got this luvin :) (Score:2)
Re:Already got this luvin :) (Score:2)
same speed and it only cost me 45 bucks. It DID
require a boost to 1.75 volts from the stock 1.5 and
a thermalright slk-800 + 120mm fan though
Re:Already got this luvin :) (Score:2)
Death of the upgrade. (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone remember just a couple years ago when you could actually plan out a simple upgrade to your computer that would make it perform better for a modest price?
Toss in some extra RAM, wow no swapping!
Replace that CPU, doesn't Quake run good now!
The furious pace of bus speed changes have pretty much killed these types of upgrades for home/desktop users. Adding more PC2100 ram to their system when they know they're getting a DDR400 mobo is highly annoying. And forget about popping a new P4 or Athlons into your 1 year old mobo. Gotta buy $300 of new RAM and a $200 new DDR666-PC31337 AsusBitDragonMSI Ultra Deluxe to go with it!
Bleh.
Re:Death of the upgrade. (Score:2)
With my P4 MB, I bought the best MB I could get at the time, and the slowest CPU still sold new at the time (1.7GHZ CPU), after the 3.0something P4 was released, a BIOS was released to take advantage of it.
It would be nice if CPUs weren't cloc
Re:Death of the upgrade. (Score:2)
Re:Death of the upgrade. (Score:3, Interesting)
I just upgraded to an Abit NF7-S Nforce2 mobo, with an AXP 1800+ and 512MB of PC2700 for less than $300 (from Newegg). My next immediate upgrade was to OC the CPU bus to 166 to synchronize CPU/RAM at 333. That provided a decent improvement, according to Futuremark. And my next upgrade will be to replace the CPU and RAM with a
Just underclock! (Score:5, Interesting)
DOn't underestimate the power and value you can get from underclocking.
Re:Death of the upgrade. (Score:2, Insightful)
BUT, as long as motherboard dimensions continue to shrink, chips become more integrated, and prices continue to fall, I don't see this as being a
Re:Death of the upgrade. (Score:2)
What about the Intel 800MHz bus (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What about the Intel 800MHz bus (Score:2)
With AMD and Intel moving to 400 and 800 MHz respectively, they're both moving their FSB base speeds up to 200 MHz. That's still a 50% increase in base bus speed for both parties.
some please explain quad/double pumped BUS speed (Score:3, Interesting)
I am aware that AMD 400mhz bus is a double pumped 200mhz fsb.
Could someone explain what "double pumped" actually means? if I think back I remember hearing something about how in doulbe pumped.. the cpu grabs data off the bus at the beginning, and the end of a single clock cycle. is there a downside to doing things this way?
Or perhaps.. this is the best way things should be done, and cpu designers should concentrate on LOWERING mhz (for heat/energy reasons), and UPPING the amount of data/instructions it can do in a single clock cycle?
So eventually we could move toward a computer that can run on a single clock cycle, which would be a mhzless computer? I know there is theory somewhere in there
Would it not help voltage/heat greatly if the bus was 33mhz and (12x) pumped?
--Zuchini.
(I keep writing my name, erasing and using an alias instead
Re:some please explain quad/double pumped BUS spee (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's what double/quad pumped means (Score:5, Informative)
Traditionally, the memory elements or registers on a chip will ignore incoming data until the clock signal undergoes a positive transition, i.e. logic low to logic high. At that point, assuming the data has been stable for a long enough period of time before and after the clock edge, it will be captured. However, since there is only one positive edge per clock cycle, data can only be captured on that edge.
In a double-pumped scheme, what you have is a set of 2:1 multiplexors that go to two different sets of registers. One is sensitive to positive edges, the other is sensitive to negative edges, i.e. logic high to logic low transitions. If you simply wiggle the data out faster, and you have a double-pumped scheme with a small FIFO buffer, you can recover data twice as fast as a single edged scheme. On the interface itself, there are special low skew low insertion delay clock distribution schemes that enable this to happen without too many problems.
In a quad-pumped scheme, you actually have two separate clocks that are 90 degrees out of phase with each other. In effect, you have two positive and then two negative edges to work with internally now. You wiggle data out at 4x the single data rate, and have 4:1 multiplexers to the registers, plus (again) a careful layout of the internal clocks.
The area overhead in such schemes is minimal (~10% for DDR) and really takes advantage of the speed of on-chip devices. It does take some special consideration, but from the perspective of increased die size, it's not a problem. Power, however, is significantly increased for both I/O (SSTL-2 type stuff) and for core devices because of the data rates, and that is also a consideration during design of not only the power distribution, but also the package/module design and the board design.
And, FYI, Rambus uses multiple serial/deserialization (SERDES) that wiggles data between a pair of signals (positive and negative) whose voltage differential is recovered, not for individual levels, which (supposedly but not actually) simplifies matters. Transmitting data via this differential is actually much faster than a single-ended scheme like DDR currently is (single ended meaning all I/O refer to a common ground (and voltage reference)). Then they even IIRC get into exotic schemes like multi-level differential (i.e. steppings between 0 millivolts differential and full swing). I could be wrong about the latter though...
The REAL question... (Score:4, Insightful)
The real question, at least in my mind, is whether they will make AthlonMP's with the 400-MHz bus. While it's not a wrap-up, indications seem to say that they won't, because it would compete with the hammers.
Seeing as how the AthlonMP motherboards have seperate busses for each processer, imagine if Nvidia made an "nforce" chipset with dual-channel memory for dual Athlons - each processer could get full memory bandwidth at the same time. That would be truly impressive, especially for RDBMS servers where you live and die on bandwidth.
But, of course, such a monster would be a direct competitor with the Hammers - and AMD's got too much at stake to let the Hammers fail.
steve
Get Em While They are HOT!! (Score:2, Funny)
not quite.. (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.tomshardware.com/business/20030314/ce
Also, every time AMD adds more cache or increases the FSB speed, the processor gets a lower clock rate to product number ratio. The 2700+ with 256Kb of L2 Cache is clocked the same as the 3000+ with 512Kb. So, even if they shipped 3200+'s with a 400 MHz FSB, it would probably be clocked about the same as a 3000+ (at like 2166 MHz). All in all this isn't a bad thing, but you wouldn't be getting an extra 200+'s AND the increase in speed from the faster FSB, the FSB performance bump is figured in to the model number.
So how fast will it be? (Score:3, Funny)
Best Buy rep: Based on what you described to me, I would recommend this Compaq with an Athlon 2100+ processor.
Average customer: Is that a Pentium? How fast is it?
Best Buy rep: Actually, it's roughly equivelent to the Pentium 4 architecure, and runs at about 1.8GHz.
Average customer: Oh, give me whatever's cheaper.
Best Buy: *sigh* Have you taken a look at our eMachines yet?
Re:finally (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:finally (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention the AMD runs cooler than the Intel chip.
Whoa
Re:finally (Score:2)
That's the best clock I know of and I don't think anyone else has come close. Can anyone correct me? I'd be interested to see if that really was the fastest . . .
Re:finally (Score:3, Informative)
If you don't know what you're talking about prevent yourself from posting.
Re:so? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Damn (Score:5, Insightful)
The general rule of thumb for upgrading it to put it off for as long as you can, and then buy as close to the top of the line as you can afford.
Re:Damn (Score:2)
Not always (Score:5, Insightful)
As a result, it's cheaper to buy a "lower end" system at a lower price and just replace it with a "lower end" system a year later. I'll get two systems, one of which is better than today's "top of the line", for the same price as one "top of the line" machine today.
Make sure you get something upgradable, of course.
Just look at CPU prices: Athlon XP 2500+ CPUs run around 2x the price of a 2000+. 3000+ CPUs are double that again. That's 4x the price for 1.5x the performance. Same for RAM, and to some degree hard drives. (With hard drives, you often get more "bang for the buck" by getting something close to top of the line. 120 gigs or so is currently the sweet spot as far as price per gig, and that's close to top of the line these days. But as soon as you jump to 160 or 200 gigs the price skyrockets. If you go down in size, you're spending not much less and getting significantly les.)
Re:Not always (Score:2)
Except that that's rather silly. I'd recommend buying an Athlon 2200 ($97) or 2400 ($123) - the performance improvements are marginal, but so are the price increases. It's not like it used to be where CPU speed steps were several hundred dollars apart. I certainly wouldn't recommend anything higher unless you had a good reason for it
Re:Not always (Score:2)
Low-end != cheap (Score:2)
I was talking about a high-quality but not super-top-of-the-line PC, like a lower end Dell, or in the case of homebuilt, using an Athlon XP 2000-2200+ rather than a 3000+ and a GeForce4 Ti4200 or 4400 rather than a 4600 or an FX (Although these days 4600s aren't too expensive.), and only getting 512M or RAM in 256M sticks rather than 1 gig in 512M sticks. No quality difference, but a big price difference.
Although if there's any part of a system I would not skimp on,
Re:Low-end != cheap (Score:2)
Re:Not always (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
So an Athlon XP 2500+ will have approximately the same performance regardless of the core. Despite the newer core, the 2500+ Barton (clocked at 1.83) is cheaper than the 2600+ non-Barton.
Different cores or not, the 2500+ gives approximately 25% more performance than the 2000+ at twice the price. The 3000+ gives approximately 50% more performance at over 4-5 times the price.
Re:Not always (Score:2)
The only 2500+ that exists is a new Barton core. (i.e. that page is probably out of date. NewEgg seems perfectly willing to sell me a 2500+ Barton.)
Re:Damn (Score:2)
No, that's the fool's way of upgrading. The smart way to do it is to upgrade whenever you want, but buy 6 month old hardware. That way you get a system 75% as fast as high-end for 50% of the cost.
Re:Damn (Score:2)
Your argument has merit if you're going to be upgrading your system regularly. Let's say it costs $1500 for a top of the line system. Let's also make two assumptions here: computer prices aren't changing, so any $750 system is 7
Re:Damn (Score:4, Funny)
Yikes, that's one inch I can't afford to lose.
Re:Damn (Score:2)
The general rule of thumb for upgrading it to put it off for as long as you can, and then buy as close to the top of the line as you can afford.
A friend of mine gave me this good advice:
Re:Damn (Score:2)
Seriously, it hasn't been released yet, so what's the point in speccing out hardware that will run a vapor app "well"?
Doom 3 may well run perfectly fine on a sub 2GHz machine for all we know.
Re:Damn (Score:3, Interesting)
I usually try to help my friends build their computers. The key things to remember are: the best time to build a computer is as long as you can hold out, because the longer you wait, the faster and cheaper your hardware is going to be. Also, look at pricepoint. You know how Walmart has those labels on their price tags that say "17.8 cent/oz" ? Do that with your hard drives. Right now, 120gb drives are $100 on pricewatch, 160gb drives are $160. 120
Re:Damn (Score:3, Informative)
By starting with a good motherboard, you also maximize the upgradeable lifespan of the system, because it is more likely to support newer components on down the line.
Re:The computer clueless.. (Score:2)
And
What you need is what AMD is offering - more speed on the bus.
You do realize that Intel already offers a P IV that runs on a 533MHz FSB, or 33% faster than what AMD is introducing now... right?
Re:The computer clueless.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fed Up With AMD Systems (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fed Up With AMD Systems (Score:2)
Now I've never had an AMD machine, but I used to have a Pentium MMX on a non Intel chipset and never really realized how unstable it was until I upgraded to a PIII with a BX chipset. That system's been rock-solid.
So my conclusion based on my personal experience is this:
You're better off with a chipset made by the same manufacturer as the CPU (regardless of who it is).
My experience (Score:3, Insightful)
I built my first Athlon system after seeing how well a friend made out with his Slot-A Athlon system. Socket-A 1.2GHz was the bleeding edge at the time so I got the 1.0GHz model w/ pc133.
After I'd pulled out half of my hair trying to figure out why it refused to run stable (or as stable as my Celeron 300A w/ Win98), I ditched the mobo for one of the new KT266A boards. It ran sort of OK for a month, then stopped running for more than 1 or 2 minutes at a time. After more hair-pulling I noticed that the powe
Re:Aaargh! (Score:2)
Re:Always Behind (Score:2)
Remember that an Athlon on a *measly* 266-MHz bus can often out-outperform a P4 on a 400-MHz bus, and sometimes out-perform the P4 on a 533-MHz bus. Assuming they actually increase clock speed (and not another PR game), I'll bet that this will make the Athlons VERY competitive again.
steve