Buy your Opty's while you can, AMD code change:

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Originally Posted by gundamit

The OC'er market is not even an afterthought for AMD.

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It quite obviously is, or the FX chips wouldn't even exist, let alone be unlocked :)

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Originally Posted by Kameleon

It quite obviously is, or the FX chips wouldn't even exist, let alone be unlocked :)

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The point he is trying to make is that yes, AMD does cater to the oc market but it's revenue is a very, very small percent of its total sales.

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Originally Posted by Kameleon

It quite obviously is, or the FX chips wouldn't even exist, let alone be unlocked :)

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Not really, FX chips are always the top of the line - fastest stock speeds. Companies always charge an arm and a leg when you want their best. Hence why these chips are always at least 2x more expensive than their normal A64 counterparts. When you're paying THAT much for a CPU already, you're basically also paying for that unlocked multiplier. Hell, it's probably EASIER to make an FX since they can skip the multiplier programming stage.

Same with the P4EE series, top of the line stuff that costs wayyyyy more, and AFAIK, they're not even unlocked.

So it's more like AMD saying "Meh, you enthusiasts are paying double the normal price already, might as well throw you a bone and leave it unlocked, saves us an extra step anyways"

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Originally Posted by gundamit

The OC'er market is not even an afterthought for AMD. However in the server market we have a chance to have a bigger impact than the general desktop market.
How funny would it be that the 939 Opteron turns out to be a stunning sales success (based on non-server sales) and AMD goes on to claim they're winning a bigger share of the server market which in turn gives them more sales leverage with corporate sales. A brilliant plan. ;)

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That's a good theory but I doubt corporations are dumb enough to fall for it. They will research on chipset sales too. If there's 2-3 times more CPU sales than chipset, then obviously not all of the CPUs are actually going into servers. IMO, almost all of Opterons in corporate servers will use ECC ram anyways, there is no real reason for them to use normal DDR ram and risk memory corruption.

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Originally Posted by manomanx2

thank god.

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i have been trying to get an amd64 stable @3ghz on air for over 2 years now.
my cab2e looks like it is maxing out @ 2978mhz.

there is no god.


very truly yours,
politenessman

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Originally Posted by HKPolice

IMO, almost all of Opterons in corporate servers will use ECC ram anyways, there is no real reason for them to use normal DDR ram and risk memory corruption.

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What was AMD's intention for S939 Opterons, anyway? What purpose could they possibly serve that normal A64s don't, apart from being lovely lovely clockers for us lot?

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Originally Posted by Kameleon

What was AMD's intention for S939 Opterons, anyway? What purpose could they possibly serve that normal A64s don't, apart from being lovely lovely clockers for us lot?

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There is high demand for low-memory (<= 4 GB) servers with no excessive reliability requirements either.

Socket 940 Opteron systems had a very good reputation. But less than perfection-requiring businesses are hesitant to buy because they have to buy expensive motherboards that require registered RAM, which usually means ECC, too, and the board vendors are giving out paranoid lists of qualified RAM.

Socket 939 is percived as much easier to deal with, but businesses would not buy anything labeled "Athlon 64" which they assume "Athlon == gaming".

Even in our company which is certainly smarter than average when it comes to computers did people say "now that AMD is offering Opterons for 939 maybe that's an option". It's very hard to realize the difference between a 1 MB cache Athlon 64 and a socket 939 Opteron - none.

People also ignore the fact that socket 939 mainboard also have published qualified vendors lists for RAM and some board are pretty picky. Such things are overlooked when the assumption socket 939 == easy is so convenient. Same for the assumptions that socket 939 systems have faster RAM.

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Originally Posted by Kameleon

What was AMD's intention for S939 Opterons, anyway? What purpose could they possibly serve that normal A64s don't, apart from being lovely lovely clockers for us lot?

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Smaller companies who aren't running such mission critical apps. Notice I said "almost all of the opterons in corporate servers" in my previous post.

If you look around in other forums, there are quite a few Optys for sale, that AREN'T good OCers or are "OEM, never tested" :stick:

Speculation, speculation. The only option now is to wait.

Or kidnap an AMD official.

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Originally Posted by HKPolice

There are probably varying calibrations in the test equipment. A plant in Malaysia may test a core to be 4000+ while the same chip could be tested as only 3700+ in another plant.

That would explain the varying OCs from different C codes

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The assembly and test plant in Malaysia merely does the assembly to the substrate and then tests to see if the cpu is functional - since K8 they have done no speed grading. ALL K8 speed grading but no assembly is done in Singapore.

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Originally Posted by largon

Mats,
They probably get better yields from E6 silicon than E4. Better yield -> more working cores -> more $$$ (-> price drop?)

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In theory, yes. But that's not what AMD did. The bigger, older 146(115mm², 1 MB L2 cache, E4) is $30 cheaper than the smaller, newer 3200+ (83mm², 0.5 MB L2 cache, E6). It's not because they've not updated the prices, they've done that two times last months. Yeah 146 is newer on the market but you know what I mean, E4 is older than E6.