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AMD Hardware

AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core Chips Released 254

Posted by Zonk from the oh-yeah? dept.
HaloPhreak writes "InformationWeek reports today that AMD has released the Athlon 64 X2 for the high end desktop. Intel and AMD have been competing to get these out as soon as possible, but I think it will be interesting to see what AMD will do with the mobile version of this processor, due out in 2006." From the article: "Both companies have been in a tight race to deliver the processors since engineers realized that simply ratcheting up the clock speed of single-core chips was creating too much heat and not producing the same improvements seen in previous models."
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AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core Chips Released More

AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core Chips Released

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  • DRM (Score:5, Interesting)

    by poopdeville ( 841677 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:21PM (#12687357)
    Does this have built-in trusted computing/DRM technology like the newest Intel chips?

    • Re:DRM (Score:2, Funny)

      by hubang ( 692671 )
      If it doesn't, then AMD is supporting terrorism.

      -Potentially attributable to the RIAA/MPAA

      • Re:DRM (Score:3, Funny)

        by FidelCatsro ( 861135 )
        All I can Say , Is if Anti DRM is Terrorism then Viva le reveloution(or is that la)

        • Re:DRM (Score:3, Informative)

          by menkhaura ( 103150 )
          In French, that is "Vive la revolution".
          Spanish yields "Viva la revolución".
          Portuguese, "Viva a revolução"

          • Re:DRM (Score:3, Funny)

            by FidelCatsro ( 861135 )
            Well i speak (some)Gaelic , English and German hee

            I think though if this lot gets classified as terrorism then i may perchance be on te firing line.
            Much apreciation for the corection :)

    • Re:DRM (Score:4, Funny)

      by Luscious868 ( 679143 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:25PM (#12687400)
      Does this have built-in trusted computing/DRM technology like the newest Intel chips?

      No .... However early adopters are required to turn over their first born sun or daughter to the RIAA / MPAA to be brainwashed and trained as an intellectual property lawyer.

    • Re:DRM (Score:5, Informative)

      by cybersaga ( 451046 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:25PM (#12687404) Homepage
      Apparantly so, but geek.com [geek.com] says:

      "AMD could be positioning itself as the "good guy" in this whole scenario by allowing users to optionally disregard DRM. I would suspect this would be something like Intel's serial number scheme, except that AMD will most likely leave it off by default and would require enabling it via the motherboard BIOS setup or something similar."
      • "AMD could be positioning itself as the "good guy" in this whole scenario by allowing users to optionally disregard DRM.
        They would have to, because they manufacture and sell outside of the USA, and plenty of places have no need for DRM.

    • Re:DRM (Score:2)

      by lxt ( 724570 )
      It doesn't appear to. That doesn't mean AMD won't introduce it in the future, but Intel are probably more willing to incorporate DRM since they are currently losing quite a bit of market share.

      It's to Intel's advantage to court media providers and software producers with "our chips have built in DRM", because it means they're more likely to consider promoting Intel chips. AMD appear to have the current advantage in processor architecture, and so probably don't need to bring DRM in as a "hook" for their pro
    • Does it have built in AES like newest VIA chips?

  • All around better (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cybersaga ( 451046 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:22PM (#12687363) Homepage
    With it's lower power consuption than the Intel chips, and lower heat than expected from an AMD chip of this sort, it's definitely a reason to save up.
    • "With it's lower power consuption than the Intel chips, and lower heat than expected from an AMD chip of this sort, it's definitely a reason to save up."

      Yeah, whatever. BRING ON THE 64-BIT!!!
  • Is there any chance for pin compatilbility with existing equipment?

    • Re:PIN compatibility (Score:5, Informative)

      by Enigma_Man ( 756516 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:26PM (#12687406) Homepage
      Yes, I believe they are standard Athlon 64 socket-types (939). Pretty much any motherboard will be able to support them with nothing more than a BIOS upgrade (if that)

      -Jesse
    • The X2 is definitely Pin Compatible with current 939 Opterons.
    • They're Socket 939, which is what the latest Athlon64 CPUs are as well. According to Arstechnica, you can drop one into any socket 939 motherboard after a BIOS update.

      Which makes me less wary of cobbling together a new PC soon, as I can just get an Athlon64 and wait for the dual core prices to drop (current price range is $530 - $1000).

    • I'm curious about something. If you just put in a dual-core chip is stuff going to run faster? I assume there needs to be a lot of OS support. Is it the same as SMP support or different? Do Linux/Windows/MacOS X already have dual-core support? I assume to take advantage of dual-cores at an application level it is necessary to be elegantly multi-threaded?

      Furthermore, what's the difference at the chip level? Are there hardware cache coherency controllers? Are they fast? How does the effective decrease of memo

    • Be caseful, pin compatibility might not be the only issue as we Opteron owners are finding out. Tyan's earlier server boards (e.g., K8S Pro S2882) are not dual-core compatible due to the VRM being insufficient. I wish we knew that fact before we bought our servers!
      • Yes but dig a little deeper and you will find that the power requirements of X2 are relatively modest, in line with some of the single core x64 chips. This is a good thing in that the power/heat requirements will not be a substantial expansion of the current envelope.

        I myself will be wating a while for things to settle down, then going to a AMD x64 board that has a good rep for X2 applications but I will start with an non-X2 processor. Then after the next round of product introductions and the first red

    • Any Socket 939 board should be able to take an X2 after a BIOS update; AMD has, in fact, been sending out X2 engineering samples in a readily-available board, the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, which is the S939 board I own. (Very pleased with this: part of the reason for buying S939 in the first place was the future possibility of dual-core. When the prices go down...)
  • At almost double the price of the latest Intel chips, how can AMD stay competitive? AMD has always had the lower priced chips, and developed a loyal following of "price/performace" fans. What now?

    • Re:Can AMD compete at these prices? (Score:5, Informative)

      by taskforce ( 866056 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:35PM (#12687526) Homepage
      I actually saw this exact claim being made on Yahoo News this morning and was a bit pissed off. The chips have almost identical price points.

      AMD's low end goes for $537 which is almost identical to the Pentium at $530 it actually outperforms. The high end goes for $1001 which is almost identical to the PDEE which goes for $999. And guess what, it outperforms that. Intel has a lower starting point and AMD doesn't match it, THAT is true, but if you actually compare the chips like for like it's obvious to even a brain dead monkey that X2s come at the same price points as the PDs and to anyone who thinks of looking at benchmarks, the X2s easily out perform them.

      How are X2's twice the price, I thought people understood the whole Mhz thing now...

      • Nope, they also don't understand that AMDs onboard memory controls where designed for this type of application. The AMD X2 chips are a very efficent design.. The intel Design has many week points and seems rushed.

      • Sure, AMD performs better than Intel at these price points you talk about, but that's not what most computer buyers (including me) care about.

        The main problem is that AMD has no dual core answer at the lower price point. Right now, when I do my hardware refresh in a few months, it'll be a really tough decision between a Pentium D dual core or an Athlon 64 single core, depending on whether I value gaming performance or system responsiveness more. I don't want to make that choice. I've always been an AMD

        • I've always been an AMD fan; their chips are better. I don't understand why they can't come out with a 1.8 Ghz or even 1.6 Ghz Dual Core chip at around 200 dollars, and simply trounce all the competition. Right now, what they're doing is "Oh Look! Here's some shiny new chips. Shame you can't afford them."

          Why would AMD sell you a chip for $200 when they can sell it for $550-1000? They've got a chip that outperforms the Intel counterparts and would be stupid not to sell them for premium prices when there

          • Why would AMD sell you a chip for $200 when they can sell it for $550-1000?

            You're missing his point. If he has to choose a $200 chip, he's not going to scrape and scrimp to get the $537 for AMDs new chip.

            If AMD had the big OEMs on board, it wouldn't matter. Dell and Gateway would buy up all of their chips, regardless of price.

            Fact is, they don't. AMD is going to be churning out chips that may or may not be snapped up before they are replaced by the next batch.

            AMD's bread and butter is the discount PC a
            • AMD's bread and butter is the discount PC and the gaming PC market.

              Did you forget that AMD still sells relatively inexpensive single-core chips?

        • Right now, when I do my hardware refresh in a few months, it'll be a really tough decision between a Pentium D dual core or an Athlon 64 single core, depending on whether I value gaming performance or system responsiveness more.

          So get a single core proc and upgrade it in a year or two.

          I don't understand why they can't come out with a 1.8 Ghz or even 1.6 Ghz Dual Core chip at around 200 dollars

          Would it make sense? They've got single core stuff that probably covers that performance range.

        • A dual core 1.6 at $200.

          Right now, you can get a single core Athlon 64 3200 for $200.

          Considering that said processor is 2x faster (clock wise) than your dual core solution, and that dual cores are not necessarily 2x faster than whatever speed they are rated for, I would say that it would not be very smart for you to even buy such a chip, let alone AMD manufacture one.
      • We miss AMD's that were cheaper...

        Might be time for a third manufacturer to hit the scene.

        Transmeta Dual Core 10ghz 3 ALU processors or somehting?

    • Re:Can AMD compete at these prices? (Score:5, Informative)

      by friedmud ( 512466 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:42PM (#12687598)
      The problem is that you are comparing a 2.8Ghz P4 to a 2.2Ghz Athlon64... which is completely off.

      Note the graphs over here: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2429&p=6 [anandtech.com]

      See how the 3200+ running at "just" 2Ghz is outperforming even a 3.4Ghz P4 and sometimes even a 3.5 or 3.6Ghz P4.

      Also look at how a 2.8Ghz P4 isn't even on the charts... use your brain and extrapolate from the P4's what the 2.8Ghz P4 would be posting and you can see that it is WAY slower than even a 2Ghz Athlon64.

      Now let's talk about what was in this article.

      They told us that the lowest end Athlon64X2 is clocked at 2.2Ghz (the same as a 3500+ and faster than the 2Ghz chip in my above examples) and comes in at $537. The lowest end PentiumD is clocked at 2.8Ghz and comes in at $241.

      At first glance it looks like the A64X2 is double the price... but then look at the highest end PentiumD at 3.2Ghz it's priced at $530.

      Ok... use your brain again and realize that the 2Ghz A64 was outperforming a 3.4Ghz P4 and it's easy to see that the A64X2 at 2.2Ghz priced the SAME as a 3.2Ghz PD means that the A64 is actually the LOWER priced part.

      The difference here is that AMD chose to focus on the high end. They didn't play "low-ball" with Intel because they don't have to. Their cheap single core chips will wipe the plate with the low-ball PD and will be cheaper as well... while their A64X2 is there AT THE SAME PRICE POINT to compete with the high end PD.

      In summary... they are priced competitively.

      I hope all that made sense.

      Friedmud
      • Intel servers are going to be cheaper. You can't beat Dell's price point on servers both high end or low end.
        • You can't beat Dell's price point on servers both high end or low end.


          But you absolutely can beat their engineering (BIOS, cooling, case design, host adapters), their support, and you absolutely can beat their MTBF.

          Good, Fast, Cheap. Pick any two. The CPU doesn't figure into this very much.
      • Note the graphs over here: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx [anandtech.com]? i=2429&p=6

        See how the 3200+ running at "just" 2Ghz is outperforming even a 3.4Ghz P4 and sometimes even a 3.5 or 3.6Ghz P4.

        We're talking about dual core chips and those are single core, single-threaded benchmarks (gaming). I think those graphs are only relevent if you're using single-threaded applications or single-tasking. Dual-core chips would see very little improvement in those graphs.

        Since we're talking about

    • I suspect AMD will lower their prices when they get increased capacity. All AMD64 stuff is produced at 90um on 200mm wafers at a single fab in germany. Dual cores are bigger chips than singles, so they can't just switch over without losing market share. Their deal to outsource some production apparently kicks in early 2006. Later in '06 AMD will ramp the new 65um line using 300mm wafers - in addition to the old 90um fab. So I'd guess 6 to 12 months before dual cores get a significantly reduced price. Intel
    • AMD doesn't care because Intel's dual core processors are not really shipping. The have been officially been released but are not readily available. As such until they start showing up in quantity AMD is going to keep the price of their available dual core processors at a premium. Simple economics.

      Watch as soon as someone other than review sites starts getting dual core intels AMD will probably lower their price.
    • AMD has no incentive to reduce prices below the point where they sell every chip they can build.

      All evidence suggests that AMD is constrained by supply, not demand. In that context, the high price is a reflection of AMD's competitiveness, not a hindrance to their competitiveness.

      The real downside to those high prices is that they indicate that AMD continues to be significantly constrained by manufacturing.

      Martin
    • Well for one, with the Intel two-cpu module offerings, you will need a new motherboard and well as a new powersupply judging from some of these power consumption graphs. With the AMD dualcore chip, you can use your current mobo and update your firmware, power consumption is comparable to most single core computers.

    • Intel also offers a dual-core Extreme Edition Pentium for $999 each.

      Are these numbers even right? At Dell website right now, for the XPS gen 5 desktop, it will cost 1,135 to replace the standard single core Pentium with a Dual Extreme Edition. Where are they getting $999? Does it really translate into the price at which the OEM's are selling them? Things may balance out depending on how vendors and OEM's mark up the price.

    • This is nothing new. AMD has always had some very pricy high end chips. It's in the mid range and low end chips where AMD chips cost less than their Intel counterparts.
  • It's somewhat like a car engine then. You can't just keep driving the one engine harder and harder with higher octane fuel and expect everything to be alright. If you want to really shift up to the next level of performance you actually have to add some new hardware to it (more cylinders, better transmission, etc...).

    However, you also can't expect to continually achieve better results without some problems by just throwing another engine into the car either.

  • One major drawback! (Score:3, Funny)

    by TheCreeep ( 794716 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:31PM (#12687481)
    But the technology does have drawbacks. For one, it only benefits users who run several programs at once or have software specially designed to take advantage of the two engines.
    Wow, that's one serious drawback... I wonder who on earth runs several things, like xorg, fluxbox, firefox, xmms, gdesklets & compiling the kernel in the background,... al at once!!
    Oh well.. I'm sure they'll build multy-core processor support into the kernel.
    • Generally, one big process requires the heaviest load, either a game engine, or gcc, or a video encoder, or an unthreaded database engine.

      So given the current market, users will likely run a heavy single-threaded 32-bit app on this chip expecting it to be fast. In due time we'll have x64 everything, and if you run apps from good vendors, they'll be properly threaded in a balanced way and will take the maximum advantage of the chip you purchased.
    • that quote's incredibly misleading. hit ctrl-alt-del, open your task manager, and click on the "processes" tab. how many of them have a number greater than 1 in the "threads" column? almost all of them, right? including all the big ones that are likely to bog anything down. software nowadays is generally multithreaded.
      • software nowadays is generally multithreaded.

        Lots of software is, but it is not very important how many threads a piece of software creates, but how many runnable threads there are at any given time (ie, how the work is distributed over those threads)
  • What will be the impact on Desktop Linux? I ask this because I wonder whether my SuSE 9.2 Linux desktop will stop feeling "heavy" with this "dual core" stuff. Imagine this: You click on a desktop icon and the response comes after about 3-4 seconds. In openOffice.org, it's even worse. I am using an AMD Sempron 2800+ with 512MB of RAM.

    • Re:What will be the impact on Desktop Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:39PM (#12687569)
      Drop KDE/GNOME. They have both become too bloated for everyday use. There's a lot of excellent "lightweight" desktop enviroments and window managers: i reccomend XFCE [xfce.org] (4.2.2). It's like Gnome after 6 months of workout and strict diet.
      • Firefox with a large number of windows and tabs (how I like it) dwarfs any WM I could use. More memory is a better solution.
        • I have an Athlon 1800+ with 512mb. I'm running, right now:

          - XFCE 4.2 with 4 desktops
          - Opera 7.54u2 with about 15 tabs
          - Beep Media player
          - Gaim, 4 accounts
          - aMule
          - Several console sessions and GVIM windows
          - Assorted sevices (Samba, SSHd, Apache, etc)
          - GKrellm2

          The system is consistently responsive and snappy, and Gkrellm reports 305Mb free (without swap pages), with 0% of the swap partition used. I know FF is quite more memory hungry than Opera, but still, there's no need for 1Gb
          • 512 is enough for a few major applications and the usual background type stuff. A gig is enough for everything you want to run simultaneously (for most people's definition of everything, obviously some users need more),

            For the set of applications I run, a gig is enough for me to not worry about it anymore. 512 isn't.

            It's going to get worse when .NET/Java applications become common on Linux. I dunno what the situation is on Windows, they might already be common.
      • Maybe so, but KDE is a much nicer development framework than plain GTK.
    • If your CPU is idle on your current system, why would expect a dual core system to be any faster? The task at hand probably doesn't involve any parallel operations.
    • That has more to do with GUI design than sheer power. When you click on an icon, it starts to piece together code from libraries and files everywhere, sometimes before the app window appears. That means disk bandwidth, and the concurrentness of disk reads. If it is read from a RAID 5 array, the program might start much faster than a single 5200RPM IDE disk with the head clicking back and forth while the CPU idles at 2%.

      For this reason, OSX is quite snappy, and even WindowsXP is more snappy at starting most
    • You may want to upgrade your kernel. For Dual core opterons to run somewhat stable in Linux you need a 2.6.12-rcx kernel or one that has the dual core patches backported to an earlier kernel. Your stock 9.2 kernel probably doesn't have the required patches.
    • Wow. This sounds like a problem, assuming we're talking about reasonably lightweight apps you're starting. Leave OpenOffice out of this for a second, as it does have some startup time issues. But if say, a text editor or an xterm takes that kind of time, I'd say your system has trouble...I've got Ubuntu on a P4-2.4GHz w/256M, Gentoo on an Athlon 2600+ w/256M, Gentoo on a mobile Athlon 2000+ w/512M, and Fedora Core 3 on a PII-450 w/512M, and none of them are that slow.

      First things first, check to make sure

  • benchmarks (Score:4, Informative)

    by krappie ( 172561 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:34PM (#12687522)
    If anyone needs to be refreshed on how badass these chips are:

    http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2397&p=1 [anandtech.com]

    Intel must be embarrassed

  • Better than Intel's dual core chips, but expensive (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nokiator ( 781573 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:35PM (#12687537) Journal
    According to various preliminary benchmarks from The Tech Report [techreport.com], Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com] and AnandTech [anandtech.com], AMD's desktop dual-core chips are significantly better than Intel's dual-core desktop offerings in terms of performance and power consumption. This is partly due to the fact that the AMD solution has a better inter-core communication architecture and lower memory latency.

    Meanwhile, Intel's desktop dual core chips seem to offer much more aggressive pricing at this time. AMD's lowest price dual core chip, the X2 4200 is almost twice as expensive as Intel's lowest cost dual core processor. However, an interview [pcper.com] with three AMD execs on PCPerspective.com claims that "AMD would eventually have lower priced Athlon X2 processors via the waterfall effect in the future".

    • The point has been made earlier in this page that the AMD chips are priced competetively when you compare *actual performance* rather than clock speed.

      AMD just didn't bother making slow dualie chips, probably because the single-cpu Athlons chips are faster and cheaper than the lower-end Intel dualies.
    • You can't compare "lowest priced CPU" to "lowest price CPU". That's like saying 15 lbs of apples at $5 is a better deal than 30 lbs of oranges at $8. $5 $8 so it must be a better deal. [rolls eyes]

      Look at the specs of the lowest priced A64-X2 and compare those specs to the lowest priced PD. You'll noticed that the performance of the A64-X2 is a lot higher than that of the PD.

      Work your way up Intel's price chart until you find a PD or even PEE CPU that has similar performance to that of the lowest pri
      • Stupid comment system stripped my less than sign out even though it's posted as plain text. The above comment should start:

        You can't compare "lowest priced CPU" to "lowest price CPU". That's like saying 15 lbs of apples at $5 is a better deal than 30 lbs of oranges at $8. $5 is less than $8 so it must be a better deal. [rolls eyes]

  • Engineers Realized it, PHB didn't. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rahvin112 ( 446269 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:38PM (#12687557)
    The engineers realized the diminishing returns of clock speed years ago, it took them this long to convince the PHB's.
    • Really? I guess the G5 running at double the clock speeds of G4 suffers from this dimishing return. IBM should of said screw it and kept with the G4 mhz speeds. Mhz isn't everything you know. </Sarcasm

      • I guess the G5 running at double the clock speeds of G4 suffers from this dimishing return. IBM should of [sic] said screw it and kept with the G4 mhz speeds.

        Not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, if you'll pardon the pun. The primary supplier of G4 chips is Motorola (now Freescale), not IBM. IBM had been producing G3 chips, and continued to produce them and supply them to Apple while Moto shifted its production focus to the G4. (Apple continued using the G3 in the iBook and eMac lines for quite

  • A Thread Unto Itself (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @03:38PM (#12687563)
    They keep saying that dual cores won't benefit users that run only a single program or game. But isn't the operating system a thread to itself? It can be handling interrupts, updating the screen, managing read/writes to the disc etc. while the main program thread runs unhindered on the second processor.
    • Yes. I don't know who says that, but I have yet to see a Windows system running a single process.

      A game that is not multithreaded or otherwise multiprocessor aware won't, by itself, run any faster. But the virus scanner, instant messenger, firewall, and seven pieces of spyware running in the background of the average Windows system will cause less processing interference with said game if the operating system does its job.

      As these things become more ubiquitous, game programmers will take advantage of

    • Re:A Thread Unto Itself (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TopSpin ( 753 ) *
      They keep saying...

      They are correct, if they limit themselves to an idealized case; one execution thread. The real world for me, however, is Eve Online. I usually have two game clients running at the same time plus Teamspeak. I am very much looking forward to SMP for my game machine.

      Your suspicion is correct; even single threaded gaming will benefit from dual core (a.k.a. SMP) hardware. If a game involves network traffic, for instance, the overhead of handling the traffic will naturally off load to t
    • Sadly, this is becoming a selling point.

      There are people who are recommending (probably to sell CPUs, not to help anyone altruistically) that home users buy dual core chips -- and devote one CPU to their primary application, and the other to run the firewalls, virus scanners, hot sync managers, print managers, network managers, scanner managers, fax managers, spyware, adware, malware and all the other crap that Windows users seem to accumulate over time.

      Made me want to cry when I heard that.


    • There are tons of different apps and threads competing all of the time - you have network code, file system code, network drivers, GUI code, messaging code, disk drivers, video drivers, DirectX, blah, blah, blah.

      Shoot, NT even has two hidden threads sitting around doing nothing but watching whether two registry entries get changed - the entries that turn Workstation into Server.

      If you look at the hidden apps and threads, there are a LOT of them. But here's the catch: All in all, they tend to use
  • Am I the only one that would love to see like a 1.4ghz version of this that runs crazy cool (temp of course)? I would die for that in the new iWill SFF box here [amdboard.com]. Imagine that. Four 1.4ghz Athlon64 cores in such a small space :) Perfect for me desktop!
  • I have to replace my system - lightning strike yesterday took out all the neighbourhood systems. My system quote for replacing with same or near same hardware is just over $5G.

    I need to get a new system, I was thinking dual CPU again(old was dual 2800+) but a dual core system could be just the thing. Anyone seen these in the channel yet?

    JC
  • ... is only to serve as a warning to others. Just started to journal this the other day.

    It would appear that the BIOS writers don't get this 64-bit thing. I picked up four 1G sticks of DDR 400 'value' RAM all at once rather than deal with mismatched venders later on. A painful step - about an extra $160 more than I planned to pay - but 2G of RAM is comes up a bit short when working with VMWare images that are running app servers. Besides, why not?

    Had I not waited for an extra three months for a revision 'e' CPU that fixes the issues using all four memory slots, I might just be a bit bitter. Nothing on any of the forms warned me that 'supported 4G of RAM' actually translates into posting - not that you can actually access 3.4G in Win2k and 3.25G in Win2003-x64. Yup, sure enough, the 64-bit version of Windows system properties thinks it has even less memory then the 32-bit original. Task manager both report the same amount as the BIOS, however.

    So, for all of those thinking this might make for a spiffy way to update an aging dual CPU rig, be warned about the RAM limitations. When DFI said 'supports 4G of RAM', they mean it will post...



    +++

    Dear Customer,

    Thank you for submitting us the query. Due to the limitation of nF4 chipset of PCI-E aperture and related peripheral cache, it's normal condition to learned about 3+GB but not 4GB with total Memory capacity within 4 pieces 1GB memory modules inserted. If there's further query please don't hesitate to let us know.

    Best,

    ----------------
    DFI Technical Support Team

    +++
    (me)
    BIOS appears to only recognize three and a half gig of RAM, of the 4G total Ram (4x1G) installed. Fired up memtest-86 and it shows 3328M cached, 257M reserved. Add that up, and it puts me almost exactly 512M short of what I expected. I ran memtest86 on each stick individually, and in pairs and no errors were reported. Windows reports I have 3,407,334 KB RAM.

    I am downloading the 64-bit SuSE Linux media. The CPU is a AMD64 3800+ Rev E (Venice core). I updated the mainboard with the current BIOS from your site.

    • It's called PCI and AGP are 32bit and need direct access memory blocks. Just like ISA has a hole at 15-16 megs. x86 memory has lots of holes and wasted ram all over the place. I have yet to see a BIOS that allows you to put in a 3.5 - 4 gig memory hole. Pretty much the simple fact is your going to waste some ram on x86 not much you can do about that.

      Anybody know of a way to recover that ram? I wouldent mind an extra 512 megs on boxes with 8 and 16 gigs in them (The joys of 8 DIMM slots in a workstation
  • Intel and AMD went dual cores because they hit the wall in terms of clock speed, but yet die size keep shrinking in accordance with Moore's Law. So why not just dump two cores and on the same piece of silicon.

    How useful will it be? Depends on what you do...

    General office use (word, excel, internet, email): minimal impact (its not like this stuff is all that intense anyways)

    Games: minimal impact for now, the next generation of games will probably be multi-threaded, so you'll start to see impacts around th

  • Could go in HP zv6000/R4000 notebooks right away (Score:4, Informative)

    by Brian Stretch ( 5304 ) * on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @05:39PM (#12688865)
    The HP Pavillion zv6000 and Compaq R4000 notebooks use Socket 939 desktop CPUs with their aluminum lid removed. They've been shipping with the old 130nm core, all the way up to 4000+. In theory there's no reason you couldn't swap in a X2, so long as the BIOS supports it, although if you read the service manual they made it much more difficult to swap CPUs than they did on the zv5000z/R3000z series. Best to wait for HP to sell them with that option.

    Too bad HP didn't include a card slot to upgrade from the onboard Radeon 200M video. Even with the 128MB dedicated RAM option (which all the retail models I've seen come with) it's too weak for serious gaming, which is pretty retarted for a desktop-replacement behemoth with the best gaming CPU on the planet. They also managed to break dual channel memory support, so sticking with the 3500+/3800+/etc ratings is a little misleading (subtract 100 to get the correct single-channel rating). That said, they're very inexpensive so you get an awful lot for your money.

    Turion dual cores wait until next year. Meanwhile, this single-core Turion notebook [hp.com] looks very tempting, for those of us who can't quite afford a Ferarri [amdboard.com].

  • What about the OS? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MarcoAtWork ( 28889 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2005 @05:46PM (#12688923)
    fine that these are compatible with s939 after a BIOS update, but will you have to reinstall XP from scratch or will it 'magically' autodetect the 2nd processor? Don't think I've ever read an article discussing this issue yet.

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