Processors - Page 123

It looks like AMD is working a little bit harder to appease the overclocking community and have a chip that is supposed to be truly special.

After a nasty round of rumors that AMD was going to lock down the hidden cores on their Phenom II X2 and X3 CPUs AMD has come out and said they are not going to do that.

The unlocking of cores on the Phenom II X3 and X2 has become something of a fad with people buying them in the hopes of having a fully working Quad at the end of the day.

To AMD this is nothing serious as they view the unlocking of these cores as benign. Apparently they do not feel it hurts sales of the true quad core Phenom IIs.

Read more here.

Someone let the cat out of the bag with regards to the CPU specs for the new iPhone 3G S, according to the gang over at Engadget the new CPU will be 600MHz and sport 256MB of RAM.

This information was grabbed off of a T-Mobile Netherland's Website.

Although this new CPU is much faster that the current one in the iPhone 3G it is more likely that the PowerVR SGX graphics chip has a hand in the increased speed too.

Read more here.

There is more AMD/ATi good news today. We hear that there may be a new chipset hitting the market soon in the form of the 785.

This will up the IGP processor from its current HD 3200 to an HD 4200 adding more processing power for HD content and light gaming but also bringing DX 10.1 support to the chipset as well.

Availability could begin as early as Q3.

Read more here

AMD seems to have hit a home run with its latest Black Edition processor, the Phenom II X4 955. The 3.2GHz processor has been overclocked to an amazing 6696MHz after being on the market just a short period of time.

Fudzilla is littered with information today on upcomming AMD products.

AMD plans on launching both the Athlon X2 7850 and Phenom II X4 955 on April 23, which is one week away. The Athlon X2 7850 will be a 65nm 2.8GHz dual core with 2x512KB L2 cache and a 2MB L3 cache. To top it off, it will also be a Black Edition chip which overclockers should thoroughly enjoy.

For those Dual CPU fans Asus is showing off a board that can handle two of the new Nehalem Based Xeons.

The new board, dubbed the Z8NA-D6, sports six slots for memory (three for each CPU) and can take registered, unregistered, ECC and Non-ECC memory. Unfortunately this monster does not support Crossfire or SLI as there is only one x16 PCI-E slot. You also get six SATA II ports and what would appear to be eight additional ports run by an SLI MeagRAID IHC. For an added bonus the Z8NA-D6 can run off of standard 24+8 ATX power or SSI.

As a content creation board this will certainly put some raw power into the hands of its owner with eight cores and 16 threads.

V16 anyone?

Read more here.

The long running rumor that nVidia is going to try their hands at an x86 CPU have finally been confirmed.

The announcement was made at an investor meeting with Morgan Stanley which could make it nothing more than an attempt to bolster dropping stock values but could also be a real attempt.

The issue now is not if nVidia can build one; they do have some talented R&D minds and are certainly quite capable of innovation (even if they do refresh and rename too much). No, the issue now is one of license. To put it simply; they do not have one. I also highly doubt with the ugliness going back and forth between Intel and nVidia that Intel will grant them one. This is even more complicated by nVidia's CEO bad mouthing Intel at every turn and calling the CPU dead.

Read more here at The Inquirer.

Following up on earlier reports of being able to unlock the disabled core on Phenom II X3 CPU's, techPowerUp says that AMD is stepping in on the issue.

Reports have been made about many X3's having the ability to enable the fourth core onboard, suggesting that AMD simply just marked the core as bad and was too lazy to use a laser to cut the link on the extra core.

Something very very interesting for Phenom II X3 and X2 owners; if the site Playwares.com is to be believe there might be a way to turn your Phenom II X3 or X2 into an X4.

According to screen shots it looks like all you need to do is set the Advanced Clock Calibration feature (if it is present in your BOIS) to Auto on any SB700/750 equipped mainboard and magically you have an X4.

We will try to confirm this but let's hope that this is true and X3 owners might have gotten a really great deal.

Read more here at Theo Valich's blog.

Well AMD is shouting about a new performance world record. This time they are showing off a score of 35,698 in 3DMark06.

The CPU in question was the Phenom II X4 940 pushed up to an astonishing 6.1GHz under Liquid Nitrogen (-188.4c). The GPUs used were two ATi 4870X2s with 830MHz core and 950MHz memory speeds. The CPU was the only part cooled by LN, the GPUs ran on the stock coolers.

*** Edit 12 February***

It seems that AMD's AM3 Phenom II has a memory problem. The problem rears its ugly head when you have more than one DDR3-1333 (or greater) module per channel. If you have all four slots on your new AM3 board filled you could encounter "unreliable operation".

The Phenom II's memory controller has two 64-bit wide memory channels that when combined (in ganged mode) offer an effective 128-bit wide controller. On most mainboards this means you have four memory slots (2 slots per channel). For the time being AMD is not recommending using more than 2 modules (one per channel) for any DDR3 clocked at 1333 or above. If you have more than 2 modules the AMD quick fix is to change the speed to 1066 and adjust the timings to help overcome the speed loss.

It seems that the root cause of the issue may be linked to DRAM voltage.
It is possible that by slightly overvolting the RAM you may be able to overcome this issue. AMD is working on a more permanent fix already.

***Edit***

***I spoke with Damon Muzny at AMD about this and it is not actually a problem. This behavior is actually by design. The reason is that AMD could not predict the behavior of all DDR3-1333 memory. They found that with certain lower quality memory modules and all four slots populated (2 modules per channel) they encountered instability. They were faced with a choice; either they could drop listing support for DDR3 - 1333 or they could design the system to down clock the memory to 1066 and recommend it to everyone using 2 modules per channel.

You have probably guessed what they chose.

In all honesty you can usually get more performance from a lower clock and tighter latency than a high clock and loose latency. Or you could always bump up the memory voltage and bring stability back that way.
***

The folks at Donanim Haber have gotten hold of an early Phenom II X3 series CPU dubbed the 720 Black Edition and they've run some tests with it to give us an idea of what the triple cored 45nm Heka based chip with a TDP of 95W is capable of.

What do you do if your product line lags behind the competition? Well if you are AMD you get a bunch of crazed overclockers with access to some super cooling and have them push your latest CPU as far as they can.

This group was able to cool a Phenom II down to just above absolute zero (-230 degrees) using a combination of Liquid Nitrogen and Liquid Helium. Once at a good temp they notched the Phenom II up to an amazing 6.5GHz.
They even managed to break the 3dMark05 record.

I am not sure what this means other than they did it. Personally I am not impressed by 4 year old benchmarks. I would feel this was something if they ran Vantage, some Rendering or a Current game under this OC. But that is just me.

Something else to note is that a Core 2 Duo Clocked at 6.4GHz is only 354 points behind according to the 3DMark05 Top20.

Read more here.

A testament to AMDs claims about far improved headroom with its latest crop of desktop processors, the Phenom II series, Team Finland has accomplished a wicked overclock which made it all the way up to a whopping 6.3GHz under extreme cooling. Furthermore, unlike other chips that have posted near these speeds, this platform was benchable.

Some early benchmarking results of AMD's yet to be officially released Phenom II series processors have surfaced on the web which give a good indication of the expected performance characteristics.

A fellow by the name of coolice over at Malaysian tech site BreakTheLimit has somehow gotten hold of a Phenom II X4 940 processor and puts it through its paces at its stock speed of 3GHz in a wide array of tests, including Super Pi 1M and 32M, Cinebench R10, PiFast Multithreaded, WPrime 1.5, Aquamark and 3DMark06.

GIGABYTE's own Taiwanese technical marketing dude, Hicookie, has created a very in-depth guide which explains how to overclock an Intel Core i7 920 processor all the way up to 4GHz.

Though AMD's upcoming Phenom II (Deneb) series of 45nm processors aren't set to be launched until the opening day of CES next year (January 9), a few e-tailers seem assured of the launch pricing on the two models that will hit the market initially and they haven't kept it under wraps either!