AMD ending Phenom II production?

[Alaric]

It looks like the X4 and X6 are on their way out. The 45nm Thuban core is being dropped to concentrate on the 32nm Zambezi (Bulldozer). That sucks for us poor folks who were hoping to upgrade our original Phenom X4s when finances allow. I'll need a new mobo for a Bulldozer upgrade. :M

[Hdale85]

I think some of the AM3 boards will take the Bulldozer. Prices on Bulldozer are pretty similar to the previous X4 and X6 CPU's though.

[Alaric]

The AM3+ boards , but mine is AM2+ and AM3. And with my limited usage , a 980 BE or 1100T BE Would have provided great fun with overclocking for a long time. The 980 BE is $170 at newegg. The possibility of 4 cores , 4GHz on air cooling for that kind of scratch was a real attraction for me. My 9850 OCs a little bit , but heat and stability issues keep me under 2750 MHz most of the time.

[Alaric]

Just checked Tiger Direct and they don't even list the 980 anymore!

[Alaric]

Newegg is out , too.

[Hdale85]

Yeah some of the regular AM3 boards will use the new bulldozers with a firmware update, but not the AM2+ boards. I just bought an AM3 board and unfortunately so far it's not one of them.

[Kevin P]

Right now all this stuff is still cutting-edge and some mobos don't have BIOS support for the newest chips yet. Which means you may have to purchase an earlier chip so you can flash the latest BIOS onto your mobo. Or just wait for the mobo manufacturers to catch-up and start shipping boards with the updated BIOSes.

[aud19]

Bleeding edge, progress marching and all that?

[Alaric]

Right now all this stuff is still cutting-edge and some mobos don't have BIOS support for the newest chips yet. Which means you may have to purchase an earlier chip so you can flash the latest BIOS onto your mobo. Or just wait for the mobo manufacturers to catch-up and start shipping boards with the updated BIOSes.

Therein lies the problem. The earlier chips are vanishing at a terrific rate. They were cheap , built like a tank , and overclocked like crazy. The FX chips are supposed to be an improvement , but I've read several places about people who tried them and went back to the 45 nm platform. To be able to get a stable 4 GHz + on air cooling with 4 or even 6 cores for under $200 was the "Golden Age" of AMD chips. My build was under $500 and I can run 2750 MHz with no issues on all 4 cores with air cooling. Having to upgrade my mobo and get a 1st generation chip doesn't appeal to me very much. And the used market for a Phenom II is likely to have a lot of chips that have seen some serious 'clocking. Oh well. Sometimes poor folk have to live like poor folk. My current set-up is overkill for my needs as it is. An upgrade would have constituted a new toy , not a needed tool. I can already watch live TV , stream internet video , open multiple tabs in Firefox and IE9 , and do some minor video editing at the same time. And that's at the stock 2500 MHz.
On the other hand , the new AMD 8 core has already been overclocked to 8.4 GHz (new world record) and a liquid nitrogen rig is only a couple hundred bucks..... :twisted:

http://www.overclockers.com/howto-8-ghz-bulldozer/

[impala454]

So which is faster then... one core at 8GHz or 8 cores at 2-3GHz? Though I totally understand the love for simply achieving a number!

[Hdale85]

Yeah I've stopped overclocking for quite some time. I hardly notice a difference at all, except that my system is much more stable. So if you're not a fan of the new CPU's because they aren't as overclockable then I guess that's a personal issue......other then that I've heard nothing but good things about the new FX's.

[Kevin P]

Some reviews claim the per-core speed of the FXes are slower than lower-clocked Phenom II cores. Don't know if this is true or not, but a lot of software still doesn't take full advantage of multiple cores, so single-core speed is still as important, if not more important, than the number of cores.

An 8-core chip won't be twice as fast as a 4-core chip in most applications, in other words....

[impala454]

While one particular piece of software may only use one core or even a single thread, the OS still use multiple cores, so you'll definitely still see benefits, just some more than other depending on how much CPU intensive stuff you do. Really the CPU is so fast and efficient nowadays it's no longer even remotely the bottleneck most of the time.

[Lex]

Which is faster?

Still the Ferrari.

LOL

[Nick M]

The CPU has definitely outpaced the other technologies. I didn't even bother buying a new MOBO and CPU for my new HTPC... just used an old set I had.

I kinda' laugh at Moore's Law, simply because even now we have a gross excess of transistor capacity that we're not utilizing. I was also surprised at how much of that processor area is devoted to look-ahead tables and "guessing" future branches when I took my basic Architecture course (Hardware Organization & Design). It's kinda like telling the USPS you have written a letter to a family member, and they proceed to send out individual mailmen on horseback to two dozen people you know before you can tell them who it's addressed to... just to save the time required to do so - highly inefficient but done simply because they have such an excess of transistors available that they don't know what to do with them all.

Then there are the physics issues that accompany smaller (thinner) gates, such as static leakage and quantum tunneling that result in higher power consumption at idle states.

That said, it is exciting that multi-core processing has been advancing with more intelligent approaches to implementing results rather than just brute force clock-speed. I also like that more and more money is being invested on developing system-on-a-chip products.

[Alaric]

So which is faster then... one core at 8GHz or 8 cores at 2-3GHz? Though I totally understand the love for simply achieving a number!

Bingo! I'm not looking to impress anyone or break records. Just trying to do things and learn. If kept within reasonable limits , AMD chips are tough. They'll let you make small errors with nothing worse than a BSOD and a reboot. I like hands-on learning. It helps me to "feel" a system or process. I can read for hours about Northbridges and FSBs , etc.. But when I see one small change crash it , or noticably improve it , the relationships between the parts make more sense to me. Then I can start to recognize patterns and develop more accurate starting points. Hell , I'm getting old. It's good exercise for my brain! LOL