THG Looks at ClawHammer Mobo 204
An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware Guide managed to get a first look at the new Socket 754 ClawHammer motherboard. While they don't provide the benchmarks that you might be looking for, they do an excellent job and providing pictures and an overview of the ClawHammer Platform."
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
Drop outs galore.
Six more pictures (Score:5, Informative)
Also has a brief blurb in German
Loomis
Which tubes are these?? (Score:3, Informative)
Since six channels are being amplified (5.1) and three tubes are present, I'm assuming they're using three double-triodes in Class A configuration. Maybe 12AX7s? [mclink.it] Note to AOpen: people care about this kind of thing.
Older Link, Computex pictures (Score:5, Informative)
Over on the Enquirer [theinquirer.net], a correction was made to an article overnight concerning shipment dates for the Clawhammer, it will not be further pushed back, to first half of '03.
Looking that stock quotes this morning I saw this: INTC INTEL CORP 14.0099 -1.5%
I assume Yahoo stock reporting is still using one of those weird old Pentiums
Re:At least they're smart enough (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What are Vacuum tubes? (Score:5, Informative)
Vacuum tubes were used before the invention of transistors. They serve basically the same function, but are much bigger, draw more power and are slower in their response. For these reasons, they are hardly used any more.
However, when they are used to amplify sounds, they give a somewhat different sound than do transistors. Many audiophiles argue that the vacuum tube sound is superior.
However, and now comes my personal opinion, recently something of a hype has started around tubes. People who don't really know much about sound systems take tubes as a guarantee for getting superior performance. They fail to realize that the sounds are just different and which one is superior is largely a matter of personal taste - and what type of sound is being amplified. I am not at all convinced that tubes are better for sound effects in games, for example (as they have a slower response).
Tor
Re:Unfortunately, maybe 2h/2003. (Score:3, Informative)
Of course they are DE-EMPHASIZING the Clawhammer because it is running behind schedule. It has/was billed as their next savior - similar to the Athlon proc(which basically saved the company at that time). The problem is that each time the hammer is delayed things look worse and worse for AMD(and their stock price). They are trying to calm investors fears by saying the hammer is not that big of deal, but anyone with any sense knows that they need this chip out and soon.
Right now AMD is working towards profitability, meaning going after markets which are stronger (which are, right now, the value microprocessor market) thus the de-emphasizing of the latest and greatest.
There are no margins in the value market. Heck, I think AMD may sell more "value" procs than Intel does, but that doesn't make them profitable. The money is in high end business servers where people pay 1k+/proc. This is where Intel makes a ton of its money and it is where AMD wants/needs to be. AMD needs companies like Dell building poweredge servers around their proc in order to survive.
Re:Which tubes are these?? (Score:2, Informative)
Almost certainly 12ax7s... (Score:2, Informative)
12ax7s would certainly make sense, as they're still in production in several places (Russia, China, Yugoslavia) and thus relatively cheap. They're also widely used in preamps of guitar amplifiers, so you can find them at your local Guitar Center...
The EF86 [duncanamps.co.uk] was popular for hi-fi preamp applications like this in the '50s and '60s because they had lots of clean headroom, but they're not used as much any more because the ones still in production have a nasty habit of being microphonic. You'd also need twice as many of them, since they're a single pentode in roughly the same bottle as a 12ax7.
Re:754 pins?! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What are Vacuum tubes? (Score:2, Informative)
Corrections+Link (Score:4, Informative)
"to have active cooling on the north bridge, too many new, high speed bus mobos are coming out right now with passive cooling that doesn't come close to making it easy to OC"
The chipset "Northbridge" does not get over clocked with the CPU using hyper transport. The memory controller is on the cpu. So you can increase the speed of the CPU and memory without affecting the chipset "Northbridge" at all. I used quotes around Northbridge because all the features that most people think of as being part of the Northbridge are in fact incorporated into the CPU.
"What, still only 32-bit PCI slots?
This motherboard contains a hyper transport to 32 bit PCI chip. Hyper transport runs at 6.4GB/s. PCI 32 is 133 MB/s. The manufacturer chose to use 32 bit PCI because this is a commodity board. Theoretically, a motherboard could include 6 PCI-X busses supporting 6 cards each before saturating the hyper transport bus.
Powerpoint Show [130.236.229.26] about Hammer family architecture. "save target as".
Read the show notes! AMD did not edit them out.
Overclocking 101 (Score:3, Informative)
I started long before any of this was trendy, with an AMD 386SX/33 which I always ran at 40. I've now got 300 and 333MHz K6-2s, each running at 350. And soon, I'll add an unlocked Athlon XP to the mix. These machines don't crash. Ever.
It's trivial, and simple: Don't go to far. Don't up the voltage beyond manufacturer specification for the speed you're trying to achieve. If anything seems at all funny about the scenario, back down a notch and try again - don't try to "fix" it with fans and peltiers and waterblocks. Once you've found a speed that seems to work, it might not be a bad idea to step it down another notch to help with future operating variables.
The next step is rather simple: Leave it the fuck alone. You've already had all of the overclocking joy that your particular hardware combination will yield. Enjoy your pennies saved and be done with it.
CPUs are rated in the factory using similar methods. They all come off of the same line, and are tested at a high-ish clock speed. If a core fails a test at a given speed, it is retested at consecutively lower speeds until it passes. The resultant number is stamped on the package and/or burned into the multiplier.
In theory, anyway. The reality lately is that toward the end of a given core's life, there's a point at which lower speed chips simply aren't produced anymore, while there is still market demand for them. So, there's a lot of lower-cost, factory-underclocked chips on the shelf, so that AMD and Intel can stay competitive with eachother in the mid-to-low end markets.
This is evident from the price structure of commodity OEM CPUs. When there are 3 or 4 mid-range speeds are within a few dollars of eachother, they're quite likely to be exactly the same part, and may even be from the same batch.
It is inarguable that running some of these chips at faster-than-marked speeds is not in any way overclocking.
And, at any rate, it's heat that destroys CPUs, not clock speeds that are within the design parameters of the core. For this conservative approach to overclocking, added heat very nearly at non-issue status.
Therefore, I strongly suspect that my machines will last forever, as far as I'm concerned, just like every solid state device should (obvious exceptions for dried-up capacitors and flaming power supplies may apply), and that they will always have an extra month or two of useful life in them before they're deemed too slow for the tasks at hand -- for free.