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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD)
AMD 220.49-0.5%9:31 AM EST

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To: pgerassi who wrote (212730)10/5/2006 7:43:43 PM
From: eracerRead Replies (2) of 275872
 
Re: There is a way of getting FX-72 4x4 numbers by using two Opteron 2220s on a MB with only the higher power using registered ECC memory versus the unbuffered non ECC memory that would be used in 4x4s. Somehow I don't think you want to use 2 2.66GHz Woodcrests as a standin as many here know that uses more power than the 2 Opteron 2220s both fully decked out with memory.

Apples versus oranges. Woodcrest systems fully decked out with FB-DIMM memory might have higher power consumption, but many here know that Kentsfield desktop systems will have either two or four sticks of DDR2 not 8, 12 or 16 sticks of FB-DIMMs.

As for HPC loads, many of them have working sets that don't fit into the Woocrest's caches and thus force it to use main memory and there no one disputes AMD's leadership when that happens. Heck in SPECfp_rate2006, Woodcrest loses to Opteron and that holds 12 different applications.

And as for Coprocessing, as many supercomputer makers agree, Clearspeed plus Opteron is far better than Woodcrest or Itanium. And more are turning to DCA than FSBs.


As many desktop enthusiasts would agree: I don't know of any apps that use Clearspeed and I don't plan to use one of my FX-74 CPUs as a paperweight to install one.

And FSB is a bottleneck. Just look at the AMD-64 white paper with the SPEC graph with 3 different FSB speeds. Each speed reaches a plateau where increases in clock speed doesn't boost the score and that level rises with faster FSBs. Yes cache can mitigate it to a point, but it eventually runs out of gas. Why do you think Intel is investigating a way to bring multiple FSBs to a single socket? Yes, its mostly a stop gap until CSI, but thats at least 3 years away.

Imagine the bottleneck on AMD's quad-core CPU due out this year. There is no silicon, therefore no performance. At least AMD's 2006 4x0 quad-core CPU is cheap.

And due to the increased loads, the FSB speed may need to drop to 200MHz from 266MHz for desktops. So instead of a 2.66GHz Kentsfield@266 QDR, you get a 2.6GHz Kentsfield@200 QDR with a good loss of performance. Hey its happened before when most expected with Woodcrest going at 333MHz QDR (1333), that Conroe would too. It dropped to 266MHz QDR (1066) instead. That might help lower TDP at a cost of lower performance.

Kentsfield will ship with a 1066MHz FSB.
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