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HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast
I stand corrected, that time when RDRAM was on P3 before the early P4s was something I forgot about..

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Cream
May 6, 2007
Fett-kart

hootimus posted:

It would be really interesting to see a complete timeline of chipset and platform fuckups from Intel, AMD, Via, etc.

Lets concentrate on the next bang for buck chip. Bulldozer.

mpeg4v3
Apr 8, 2004
that lurker in the corner
Has anyone heard anything on the supposed Bulldozer motherboards that'll be backwards compatible with AM3 cpus? I'm looking to build a VM server on the cheap and it'd be awesome if I can get a Bulldozer motherboard and a cheap Athlon X4 or some such now and just upgrade it a year or so down the line.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

mpeg4v3 posted:

Has anyone heard anything on the supposed Bulldozer motherboards that'll be backwards compatible with AM3 cpus? I'm looking to build a VM server on the cheap and it'd be awesome if I can get a Bulldozer motherboard and a cheap Athlon X4 or some such now and just upgrade it a year or so down the line.
All of the am3+ ones should be backwards compatible.

karoshi
Nov 4, 2008

"Can somebody mspaint eyes on the steaming packages? TIA" yeah well fuck you too buddy, this is the best you're gonna get. Is this even "work-safe"? Let's find out!

mpeg4v3 posted:

Has anyone heard anything on the supposed Bulldozer motherboards that'll be backwards compatible with AM3 cpus? I'm looking to build a VM server on the cheap and it'd be awesome if I can get a Bulldozer motherboard and a cheap Athlon X4 or some such now and just upgrade it a year or so down the line.

http://www.computerbase.de/news/hardware/mainboards/amd-systeme/2011/maerz/erste-amd-bulldozer-mainboards-verfuegbar/ leads to http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=890GM%20Pro3%20R2.0&cat=Specifications which only has a "supports 8-core CPUs" as a hint on bulldozer support.
Doing a http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&q=site%3Aasrock.com+am3%2B&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq= leads to a few PDFs specifically speaking of AM3+ socket: Pro3 R2.0 (11.800 yen/$145), Extreme3 R2.0, Deluxe5, ...

If the boards are popping up in japan they should start appearing up soon in the rest of the world.

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!
Another lil' leak that gives some pretty big hints about how AMD expects BD to perform given its price positioning.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
It seems like it's going to come down to how efficient AMD's Turbo Core 2.0 is. Turbo Boost on the Sandy Bridge has turned into a huge platform advantage, and there's basically nothing out there that's going to let AMD leverage more than four cores. AMD has been trying ever since Cool'n'Quiet without much success, but maybe they closed the gap. I'm more excited about the Llano APU, it's like getting a free Radeon 6500-class videocard with your Athlon II X4, which isn't a bad deal. The CPU can also probably stand up with an external videocard a lot better than an i3.

Ryokurin
Jul 14, 2001

Wanna Die?

Nostrum posted:

AMD was also given a golden ticket by nVidia; I would be willing to bet that there are still a ton of people out there running A7N8X motherboards with a Barton 3500+.

Well, when you think about it, it's pretty easy to shine in a sea of poo poo. VIA was having some problems somewhere with every chipset from the KT400 on (AGP or overclocking stability) SiS chipsets were hit or miss, but were mostly like the early ATI chipsets and suffered from various performance issues. nVidia chipsets had their own problems that people admitted later on but they were clearly the best at the time.

HalloKitty posted:

I stand corrected, that time when RDRAM was on P3 before the early P4s was something I forgot about..

Most people forgot because they stuck with VIA chipsets or overclocked BX boards. That was the golden age of Abit and Oskar Wu designed boards that pulled off the impossible.

Alereon posted:

It seems like it's going to come down to how efficient AMD's Turbo Core 2.0 is. Turbo Boost on the Sandy Bridge has turned into a huge platform advantage, and there's basically nothing out there that's going to let AMD leverage more than four cores. AMD has been trying ever since Cool'n'Quiet without much success, but maybe they closed the gap. I'm more excited about the Llano APU, it's like getting a free Radeon 6500-class videocard with your Athlon II X4, which isn't a bad deal. The CPU can also probably stand up with an external videocard a lot better than an i3.

Didn't they admit a few weeks back that Cool'n'Quiet came kind of late in the Athlon64's design phase and as a result they have only been able to do minor improvements, but they were able to make changes to make it better from the start this time? I really hope that it is truly better as I would love to update my htpc with these, or build a fileserver

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!

Alereon posted:

It seems like it's going to come down to how efficient AMD's Turbo Core 2.0 is. .

Ryokurin posted:

Didn't they admit a few weeks back that Cool'n'Quiet came kind of late in the Athlon64's design phase and as a result they have only been able to do minor improvements, but they were able to make changes to make it better from the start this time?
Supposedly TC 2 is why BD requires a new socket/chipset. At a WAG they added support for more power planes so that they can totally turn off some cores while overclocking others. JF has already said that they can get around 500Mhz more for all cores at once if the chip has the thermal overhead. It'd make sense given the new process that if they were able to turn off some cores that weren't in use then they could overclock dynamically adjust the CPU speed to something much much higher than default clocks, maybe by as much as 1Ghz.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Ryokurin posted:

Well, when you think about it, it's pretty easy to shine in a sea of poo poo. VIA was having some problems somewhere with every chipset from the KT400 on (AGP or overclocking stability) SiS chipsets were hit or miss, but were mostly like the early ATI chipsets and suffered from various performance issues. nVidia chipsets had their own problems that people admitted later on but they were clearly the best at the time.
Even the KT133 was absolutely awful. It barely ran at its rated bus speed.

KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


PC LOAD LETTER posted:

Another lil' leak that gives some pretty big hints about how AMD expects BD to perform given its price positioning.



i3's don't cost $650+. What the gently caress is AMD smoking?

Edit: Apparently, that's the price for the entire system, which is a bullshit marketing technique, and still inflated, since Newegg is giving me about $470 for a basic system.

Double Edit: Ok, looking closer, it says a system with an i3 would start at 550, not 650. It shouldn't take me 3 tries to understand your horrible chart, AMD.

KillHour fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Mar 15, 2011

spasticColon
Sep 22, 2004

In loving memory of Donald Pleasance

KillHour posted:

i3's don't cost $650+. What the gently caress is AMD smoking?

It's system price, not CPU price.

~Coxy
Dec 9, 2003

R.I.P. Inter-OS Sass - b.2000AD d.2003AD
It's a bit worrying at the high end that the advantage to the AMD CPUs is merely "more cores". That's not a particularly useful drawcard for most enthusiasts, I would imagine.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

KillHour posted:

i3's don't cost $650+. What the gently caress is AMD smoking?

Edit: Apparently, that's the price for the entire system, which is a bullshit marketing technique, and still inflated, since Newegg is giving me about $470 for a basic system.

Double Edit: Ok, looking closer, it says a system with an i3 would start at 550, not 650. It shouldn't take me 3 tries to understand your horrible chart, AMD.

Bought a pair of decent core i3 Dell desktops in October for $370 each, work perfectly well as replacements for the 6 year old Pentium 4s they replaced and I doubt an AMD system of the same performance would cost significantly less.

~Coxy posted:

It's a bit worrying at the high end that the advantage to the AMD CPUs is merely "more cores". That's not a particularly useful drawcard for most enthusiasts, I would imagine.

MORE CORES!*

*less floating point units

Space Gopher
Jul 31, 2006

BLITHERING IDIOT AND HARDCORE DURIAN APOLOGIST. LET ME TELL YOU WHY THIS SHIT DON'T STINK EVEN THOUGH WE ALL KNOW IT DOES BECAUSE I'M SUPER CULTURED.

~Coxy posted:

It's a bit worrying at the high end that the advantage to the AMD CPUs is merely "more cores". That's not a particularly useful drawcard for most enthusiasts, I would imagine.

Most of the stuff people do that actually leans hard on the CPU will take advantage of more cores. AMD's already got a pretty good thing going with core count in the low end: you can get a quad-core Athlon II for a little bit less than a Core i3 dual, and the Athlon ends up doing very well for itself. The Phenom II X6 put up a good showing against the last-gen Core i5 quads, and even the lower-end i7s, in heavily parallel tasks. Of course, a lot comes down to performance per core, but "more cores for the same money" can be a compelling performance advantage.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Space Gopher posted:

Most of the stuff people do that actually leans hard on the CPU will take advantage of more cores.

MAME. Ah, I guess that's a dick move, though.

Per core performance is still a huge deal.

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!

fishmech posted:

MORE CORES!*

*less floating point units
BD's FPU will do 2x 128 bit ops per clock, which means unless they screwed up it could be at least as fast as SB for most of today's and the near future work loads. When AVX takes off* then that will change, but won't happen for years by which time you'll have BD2 and such out which will do 2x 256 bit ops as well.

*yes I know there are already a few things out now that support it, but heavy heavy emphasis on few. New instructions usually take quite a few years to become commonplace even if they offer a significant performance advantage, as you well know.

KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


fishmech posted:

Bought a pair of decent core i3 Dell desktops in October for $370 each, work perfectly well as replacements for the 6 year old Pentium 4s they replaced and I doubt an AMD system of the same performance would cost significantly less.


MORE CORES!*

*less floating point units

I should note that the i3 system I mentioned was Sandy Bridge and that Dell doesn't carry any Sandy Bridge i3 systems (that I know of). I still think their prices are random and stupid, however.

Sinestro
Oct 31, 2010

The perfect day needs the perfect set of wheels.

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

Another lil' leak that gives some pretty big hints about how AMD expects BD to perform given its price positioning.




...

:eng99:

Welp, there goes my hopes for competition for the Sandy Bridge-E series.

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!
They aren't out yet so its possible that may be why they aren't listed for comparison, no prices and such. That being said the socket 1366 CPU's aren't listed either. We'll have to wait and see as usual to know for sure.

And some more leaks.

If this and the other slide are correct that means we can expect a quad core Llano with 320-400 SP's to sell for around $150-200 for the highest end model. The lower end dual core and 160 SP models will probably go for around $100. Bear in mind you'll need a new socket/mobo (socket FM1) for Llano to work. Still seems like a good deal if this pans out.

PC LOAD LETTER fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Mar 16, 2011

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
You know I suppose for "System Price" they're including the cost of a monitor, right?

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!
I know on the very low end prices seem about right for the whole PC new. Sub $400 for a Ontario/Zacate system is pretty close to what they sell for right now for instance. Doing a quick and dirty check online at Tigerdirect and newegg i7 prices for the desktop actually seem to be around $50-100 higher than the $700 cut off on the chart and that is without the monitor. i5 system prices seem to be around $550-700 or so, also without the monitor. i3 systems are about the same price wise as the i5's.

Sure there are some deals that will skew things either which way, but I don't think chart is off by much if it is off at all.

PopeOnARope
Jul 23, 2007

Hey! Quit touching my junk!

Ryokurin posted:

Most people forgot because they stuck with VIA chipsets or overclocked BX boards. That was the golden age of Abit and Oskar Wu designed boards that pulled off the impossible.

What ever happened to Oskar Wu after the DFI days, anyway? I know he had his hand in the 939 SLI boards, but after that he just seemed to vanish.

Stanley Pain
Jun 16, 2001

by Fluffdaddy
Just got word that a lot of ASUS AM3 boards are going to be AM3+ compatible :woop: There's already a beta BIOS out for my Crosshair IV Formula with bulldozer support. Good times!

spasticColon
Sep 22, 2004

In loving memory of Donald Pleasance
So let me get this straight, you can put a BD chip in an AM3 motherboard with a bios update but you can't put a AM3 CPU in an AM3+ motherboard?

frumpsnake
Jan 30, 2001

The sad part is, he wasn't always evil.

Stanley Pain posted:

Just got word that a lot of ASUS AM3 boards are going to be AM3+ compatible :woop: There's already a beta BIOS out for my Crosshair IV Formula with bulldozer support. Good times!

That's pretty loving sweet.

ASUS posted:

Stockholm, Sweden (March 15, 2011) — ASUS, the worldwide leader in motherboard design and sales, today announced the release of the industry's first AM3+ CPU enabled motherboard solution based on the existing AMD 8-Series Chipsets. Current owners of an AM3-based board* can make their AMD 8-Series motherboards compatible with the latest AM3+ CPUs with a simple BIOS** update from the official ASUS website.

ASUS provides options for users to be the first to enjoy AM3+

AMD’s new AM3+ CPU is a complete microarchitecture redesign from previous AMD CPUs, and offers better performance over the previous generation. As such, ASUS is committed to provide continuous support for the latest technologies, and is the first to market for a product solution for user’s needs. Current ASUS 890FX and 890GX series motherboards can be upgraded to enjoy the extra performance offered by future AM3+ CPUs. ASUS will also be releasing*** the AMD 8-Series Chipset motherboards based on 880G and 870 as well as the 760G Chipset with the AM3+ socket for increased selection so users can enjoy AM3 and

AM3+ CPUs.

Current AMD 8-Series chipset based motherboards feature award-winning overclocking utilities, along with ASUS Core Unlocker which was widely recognized by global media at its debut while Turbo Unlocker offers real-time adjustments to enhance system performance. All utilities are designed to help the user achieve maximum performance from their systems.

*BIOS Upgradable Supported AM3 models:

AMD 890FX/SB850:

*Crosshair IV Extreme
*Crosshair IV Formula
*M4A89TD PRO/USB3
*M4A89TD PRO
AMD 890GX/SB850:
*M4A89GTD PRO/USB3
*M4A89GTD PRO

**Current BIOS update is a beta release. Please check the ASUS support site for continual updates.

***Upcoming ASUS M5A Series models (AM3+ socket with AMD 8-series chipsets):

AMD 880G
M5A88-V EVO
M5A88-M EVO
M5A88-M
AMD 870
M5A87
AMD 760G
M5A78L
M5A78L LE
M5A78L-M/USB3
M5A78L-M PLUS
M5A78L-M LE
M5A78L-M LX

Misogynist posted:

Even the KT133 was absolutely awful. It barely ran at its rated bus speed.

Were you trying to run it at 133MHz or something? The KT133 only ran at 100MHz.

frumpsnake fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Mar 17, 2011

Ryokurin
Jul 14, 2001

Wanna Die?

spasticColon posted:

So let me get this straight, you can put a BD chip in an AM3 motherboard with a bios update but you can't put a AM3 CPU in an AM3+ motherboard?

No, an AM3 chip can go into a AM3+ board similar to how you could do AM2 into AM2+.

What it sounds like is that they may have added in a undocumented feature that allows some AM3 boards to work with an AM3+ chip, but probably at some small disadvantage, similar to how some K6/2 chips internally mapped a multiplier higher so old 66mhz boards could use it (but obviously at a speed disadvantage compared to a reall 100mhz board)

Keep in mind they did make some AM3 boards off of 790 chipsets and I highly doubt that there will be bios updates to those boards, and even then having a 800 series chipset isn't a guarantee.

frumpsnake
Jan 30, 2001

The sad part is, he wasn't always evil.
It is odd, because six months ago AMD said that they had to outright scrap AM3 support:

AMD posted:

"When we initially set out on the path to Bulldozer we were hoping for AM3 compatibility, but further along the process we realized that we had a choice to make based on some of the features that we wanted to bring with Bulldozer. We could either provide AM3 support and lose some of the capabilities of the new Bulldozer architecture or, we could choose the AM3+ socket which would allow the Bulldozer-base Zambezi to have greater performance and capability.

The majority of the computer buying public will not upgrade their processors, but enthusiasts do. When we did the analysis it was clear that the customers who were most likely to upgrade an AM3 motherboard to a Bulldozer would want the features and capability that would only be delivered in the new AM3+ sockets. A classic Catch-22.

Why not do both you ask? Just make a second model that only works in AM3? First, because that would greatly increase the cost and infrastructure of bringing the product to market, which would drive up the cost of the product (for both AMD and its partners). Secondly, adding an additional product would double the time involved in many of the development steps.

So in the end, delivering an AM3 capability would bring you a less featured product that was more expensive and later to market. Instead we chose the path of the AM3+ socket, which is a path that we hope will bring you a better priced product, with greater performance and more features - on time.

When we looked at the market for AM3 upgrades, it was clear that the folks most interested in an AM3-based product were the enthusiasts. This is one set of customers that we know are not willing to settle for second best when it comes to performance, so we definitely needed to ensure that our new architecture would meet their demanding needs, for both high performance and overclockability. We believe they will see that in AM3+."

To me, that sounds like AM3 wouldn't work *at all* based on their design decisions. So what is so special about those 6 ASUS boards?

It also looks as though AMD aren't going to support this configuration at all.

frumpsnake fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Mar 17, 2011

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
My guess would be that Asus got enough advanced notice of the AM3+ spec to design those boards with it in mind, though perhaps not to the level where they are fully compliant with the final spec.

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!
I think AMD always said that the new socket was to allow for TC2 and some new power savings options, which won't work if you put a BD into a AM3 socket. It was probably always technically possible, after all the north bridge doesn't have the memory controller anymore and the interconnect is somewhat generic now*, but for some reason AMD didn't want to do it. I guess ASUS decided to give it a shot, and you might not care about power savings and TC2 if you're gonna OC the thing anyways.

*AMD uses HT as a bus between the North Bridge and CPU, the South Bridge connects to the North Bridge via a PCIe variant IIRC, which is why you can find 7xx chipset AM3 motherboards and 8xx chipset motherboards with the old SB710 South Bridge instead of the newer SB850 one.

Sinestro
Oct 31, 2010

The perfect day needs the perfect set of wheels.
Various places are reporting that some Interlagos benchmarks were leaked. This looks promising.

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!
Yea saw that. Didn't mention them because the test system apparently is configured improperly and/or is buggy beta hardware. 1 benches looked good, others were actually slower than Phenom II's. Doubtful that will reflect the final product since JF-AMD already said BD will be faster per clock than the "Stars" core.

Not A Gay Name
Nov 8, 2008
Not exactly about Bulldozer itself, but still relevant. It seems that for the 990 chipsets AMD came to an agreement with Nvidia to get SLI support.

http://vr-zone.com/articles/nvidia-to-unlock-sli-for-amd-990-series-chipsets/11778.html

Up to Tri-SLI on the 990FX and just vanilla SLI on the 990X.

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!
Its only for mobo OEM's who already have a SLI licence though, but still nice to have as an option without using the lovely and ooold NF200 chip.

Also RWT did about as good as an evaluation as possible on those crappy leaked BD benches, has some good info.

pienipple
Mar 20, 2009

That's wrong!

Arsten posted:

Honestly, I'm still with AMD because I can pick up 85-90% of the ability for around 50% of the price. I can match if I spend 80% of the price of the equivalent Intel processor.

This, it's pretty hard to beat AMD for value when rolling your own desktop. That and I've been happily using AMD processors since the K-6 chips, so there's the inertia factor as well.

Hell I've gotten a shitload of use out of my current system, since I bought an Athlon 64 X2 4200+, Asus M2N-E motherboard, and DDR2 ram in 2005 and just recently upgraded the chip to an Athlon II X4 640 on the same motherboard.

Sounds like it might be time to retire the M2N-E to media center duties in the fall.

Sinestro
Oct 31, 2010

The perfect day needs the perfect set of wheels.
But my computer gets 36 points higher on some stupid artificial benchmark for just $500 more! :smug:

ate shit on live tv
Feb 15, 2004

by Azathoth

Nonpython posted:

But my computer gets 36 points higher on some stupid artificial benchmark for just $500 more! :smug:

Then why upgrade at all? I can spend 0$ and ignore all benchmarks and still browse the web with windows 95 and internet explorer 3.0. :smugdog:

MaxxBot
Oct 6, 2003

you could have clapped

you should have clapped!!

Nonpython posted:

But my computer gets 36 points higher on some stupid artificial benchmark for just $500 more! :smug:

I agree that AMD makes some great value processors and that they're just fine for gaming but yes paying $50-100 more to get a 2500k will net big improvements in performance if you do much other than gaming.

Tragic Otter
Aug 3, 2000

MaxxBot posted:

I agree that AMD makes some great value processors and that they're just fine for gaming but yes paying $50-100 more to get a 2500k will net big improvements in performance if you do much other than gaming.

From every benchmark I've seen, it'll net you big improvements in gaming as well.

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fart simpson
Jul 2, 2005

DEATH TO AMERICA
:xickos:

MaxxBot posted:

I agree that AMD makes some great value processors and that they're just fine for gaming but yes paying $50-100 more to get a 2500k will net big improvements in performance if you do much other than gaming.

There is absolutely no way getting a 2500k will only cost you $50-$100 more than an Athlon II x4 system

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