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| AMD's AM2 Platform DDR2 ... Moving On | |
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(Review by MS May 23, 2006) |
Final Words
It was certainly not an easy task for AMD to move to the DDR2 technology that, at first glance, does not appear to be any reasonable match for the low latency architecture pushed by AMD. On the other hand, there is no turning back time, most DRAM manufacturers have invested heavily into the DDR2 technology, with a bit of investment help from Intel (Elpida) or just because DDR2 is more economic and will be the memory of choice for high system memory density configurations anyway.
At this point, it appears as if AMD has weathered the transitional storm, however, it is also clear that for top performance, AMD needs DDR2-800, specifically for the half-core processor line. For the average consumer, none of this may matter, for email and web surfing , memory latencies and the last 2 % of performance are still moot points. For the die-hard performance oriented user - which includes the entire gaming community, it means, though, that they will have to look outside the established OEM memory channels and go with the entusiast / overclocker suppliers like Mushkin, Corsair or OCZ in order to get DDR2-800 or, in due time, DDR2-1066.
In the sense of progress, it is also interesting to take another look at what happens at the backend of the CPU, that is the Hypertransport interface. Only one week ago, the HT3 specifications were announced and they open a cornucopia of additional possibilities. Besides raw bandwidth increase to 41 GB/sec, one of the possibilities is the use of dual CPU sockets where one socket is used for the CPU and the other one for a dedicated coprocessor linked to the primary CPU via a low latency hypertransport link. This could become extremely interesting for PhysX co-processors or database / semantics analysis DSPs, one area where current CPUs are not very efficient.
Overall, the release of the AM2 platform is certainly not the big bang that some might have expected, on the other hand, it is no small accomplishment in the sense that AMD does not lose performance either, on the contrary, some of the benchmarks looked actually quite good. At the same time, as performance leadership come in cycles, the looming release of Intel's Conroe/Merom will most likely render the performance crown back to the men in blue. There is, however, another initiative to be revealed by AMD within the next few days that could change this perception ever so slightly....
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Athlon64 X2-3800+ (dual core) |
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