soldier
05-18-2006, 08:20 AM
The new chip architecture enhances the design underlying the current Opteron, Turion and Athlon 64 chips. Performance will increase and AMD will keep a lid on power consumption. What more do we gamers want?!
"Rather than focus on coming out with a new core every other year, we're focusing on the big picture" of overall system performance, said Chuck Moore, a senior fellow at AMD.
HyperTtransport, the input-output technology feature on AMD chips will feature a faster version under the new AMD architecture. HyperTransport will accomplish 5.2 gigatransfers (5.2 billion transfers of data) per second per second. Although it doesn't get as much attention as 64-bit processing, HyperTransport is behind much of the performance gains of AMD chips in recent years.
The new chips will also sport four processing cores. AMD's best chips currently come with two processing cores.
However, one of the biggest changes will come in the caches. Instead of AMD's current chips with two caches, these next-generation chips will have a third cache. With the third cache, the processor will less often have to fetch data from main memory , a time-consuming process.
The upcoming AMD chips will also curb power consumption by allowing the memory controller or the processor core to independently power down during idle period.
The integrated memory controller on the new chips will also connect to DDR2 memory and accommodate DDR3, a memory specification under construction. AMD's rival's, Intel will match its future server chips with another memory standard, called FB-DIMM. Again, which of these is better is under debate between the two companies. AMD says that FB-DIMM produces more heat.
An Intel representative said the amount of extra energy is minimal, adding that AMD won't support FB-DIMM faster than standard DDR memory because of the integrated memory controller.
AMD will come out with the new chip architecture in 2007, and it's not messing with the basic formula that has helped it take market share away from Intel...
"Rather than focus on coming out with a new core every other year, we're focusing on the big picture" of overall system performance, said Chuck Moore, a senior fellow at AMD.
HyperTtransport, the input-output technology feature on AMD chips will feature a faster version under the new AMD architecture. HyperTransport will accomplish 5.2 gigatransfers (5.2 billion transfers of data) per second per second. Although it doesn't get as much attention as 64-bit processing, HyperTransport is behind much of the performance gains of AMD chips in recent years.
The new chips will also sport four processing cores. AMD's best chips currently come with two processing cores.
However, one of the biggest changes will come in the caches. Instead of AMD's current chips with two caches, these next-generation chips will have a third cache. With the third cache, the processor will less often have to fetch data from main memory , a time-consuming process.
The upcoming AMD chips will also curb power consumption by allowing the memory controller or the processor core to independently power down during idle period.
The integrated memory controller on the new chips will also connect to DDR2 memory and accommodate DDR3, a memory specification under construction. AMD's rival's, Intel will match its future server chips with another memory standard, called FB-DIMM. Again, which of these is better is under debate between the two companies. AMD says that FB-DIMM produces more heat.
An Intel representative said the amount of extra energy is minimal, adding that AMD won't support FB-DIMM faster than standard DDR memory because of the integrated memory controller.
AMD will come out with the new chip architecture in 2007, and it's not messing with the basic formula that has helped it take market share away from Intel...