AnandTech's AMD Socket-AM2 Performance Preview

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by AnandTech

Given that AMD was supposed to launch in June at Computex, the fact that AM2 was performing so poorly just five months before launch was cause for worry. Despite our worries, we elected not to publish benchmark results and to give AMD more time to fix the problems. We're not interested in creating mass panic by testing a product that's clearly premature.

In February we tried once more, this time with a new spin of the AM2 silicon, but performance continued to be lower than Socket-939. Luckily for AMD, the performance had improved significantly, so it was slower than Socket-939 but not as much as before.

The next revision of the AM2 silicon we received sometime in March, and this one finally added support for DDR2-800, which is what AM2 will launch with supposedly at Computex. With the launch only three months out, we expected performance to be at final shipping levels, and we were left disappointed once more. Even with DDR2-800 at the best timings we could manage back then, Socket-AM2 was unable to outperform Socket-939 at DDR-400.

That brings us to today; we're now in the month of April, with less than two months before AMD's official unveiling of its Socket-AM2 platform at Computex in June, and yes we have a brand new spin of AM2 silicon here to test. We should note that it's not all AMD that's been holding AM2 performance behind. The motherboard makers have of course gone through their fair share of board revisions, not to mention the various chipset revisions that have changed performance as well. Regardless, according to internal AMD documents, AM2 CPUs are going to start being sold to distributors starting next month, leaving very little time for significant changes to the CPU to impact performance. We feel that now is as good of a time to preview AM2 performance and put things into perspective as we're likely to get before the official launch.

Read More...

[One4yu2c]

Conroe's looking more and more attractive...

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by One4yu2c

Conroe's looking more and more attractive...

EXACTLY what I was thinking too!
I have a feeling this initial AM2 lineup will be more of a "stop-gap" for future revisions and architechture changes (probably 2007).
Like what AnandTech concluded, for someone sitting on an up-to-date s939 system, AM2 really doesn't offer much. But if you are upgrading from an older generation platform (particularly a DDR2 Intel platform), then AM2 seems like it would be a fine choice. We'll just have to wait and see what AMD's new AM2 processors are like when they launch! It will definately be interesting to see how those low power processors do in overclocking!!

[Tyreal]

If you guys are interested and haven't seen it yet.. i'll post up the conroe road map. It looks pretty good. I still want to see how AMD's high end processors are going to match up against it.

[gvblake22]

I don't think I've seen it, post it up! :thup:

[Tyreal]

i will :D When i get home later on this afternoon.

[Tyreal]

Well. here it is. Conroe will be released as part of the "Core" series. It will be using the LGA775 Socket.
E6700: 2.66 GHz / FSB 1066/ 4 MB shared L2 cache. $530 @ launch
E6600: 2.40 GHz / FSB 1066/ 4 MB shared L2 cache. $316 @ launch
E6400: 2.13 GHz / FSB 1066/ 2 MB shared L2 cache. $241 @ launch
E6300: 1.86 GHz / FSB 1066/ 2 MB shared L2 cache. $209 @ launch
E4200: 1.60 GHz / FSB 800/ 2 MB shared L2 cache

The conroe extreme edition will probably be a Xeon by the looks of it since most of the older EE processors were based off Xeons.

[gvblake22]

HAHAHAHAHHA, I like how Intel "conveniently" went with the four digit naming scheme that just happens to be twice the value of the Athlon64 processors names!
That will no doubt trick many people...

But anyway, the 6300 and 6400 look very promising! :twisted:
I still refuse to pay more than $200 for one though. I have never paid more than $200 for a processor yet and I don't plan to! 8)

[Tyreal]

Neither have I! (in american... you can't help but pay for over 200 in canadian).

HAHAHAHAHHA, I like how Intel "conveniently" went with the four digit naming scheme that just happens to be twice the value of the Athlon64 processors names!
That will no doubt trick many people...

Wow really? I didn't even notice.

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by Tyreal

Neither have I! (in american... you can't help but pay for over 200 in canadian).

Wow really? I didn't even notice.

Yeah, c'mon man...
A64 3200
Core 6400
Silly Intel :roll: