Notes from the AMD June 1st Tech Demo.

I took a few notes on the webcast. I thought I'd share them here. These are all based off of AMD's statements so expect a heavy pro-AMD lean on this, however as this could be considered guidance and as AMD is a publicly traded company, this should be at least reasonable if not exact.

65nm production will be released in Q4 of 2006. This could be as early as September. If you remember the transition from 130nm to 90nm you'll remember that resellers had lots of 130nm parts left in inventory for some time after the transition this was due not only to stock levels but also in that 130nm parts were still being produced. This may not be quite the case as AMD has been working on streamlining their inventory chain. This has resulted in 35% less inventory being stocked and therefore may result in a similar reduction in cross over times. However AMD will be producing 90nm parts till mid-2007. At which point, all production (FABs et. al) should have transitioned to 65nm.

I had the opinion that 65nm versions of most if not all of the AM2 product line would be released. This would make sense as some chips not meeting specifcation X would undoubtably be viable at lower specifications.

As 90nm closes out, 45nm should be in the last stages of pre-production. AMD's belief is that 45nm will begin production in mid-2008. Note that 65nm should phase out in 2009. AMD has accelerated it's time tables on pretty much everything to keep pressure on intel and the various production technologies are of course a large part of that. In the far future, 32nm is slated for early 2010.

Quad core should not be available until early 2007, it's my opinion that they'll ship quads within the same period as intel does if not earlier. Quad cores will be the next PR coup and AMD isn't about to miss it.

One of the more interesting things was AMD's production abilities. With it's contracting with Charter to produce parts AMD no longer feels the need to build new fabs but rather they believe they can now act on a process of continuous upgrade to meet needs with the additional capacity that Charter offers.

Part of AMD's design philosophy has been to continuosly upgrade it's transitor design. Each production run has featured an evolving transitor design that would seem to allow AMD to make a more natural progression from 90nm to 65nm as the transitor itself is slowly produced in a smaller and smaller space. This would explain AMD's ability to squeeze out faster and faster chips from a core that is basically several years old. It would also explain why many of these chips have the same overclocking headroom as their older and slower siblings. AMD believes this philosophy is what is allowing them to transition easily to 65nm.

It's my impression that AMD is currently producing or very shortly will be producing production quality and production quantity 65nm parts.

The quad core will feature a 2MB L3 cache shared between cores. This is smaller than what intel will ship and AMD states the cache is unnesscary when you have a more efficient design. Regardless, the small cache will allow for a small chip size and therefore more chips per wafer which means lower cost per chip and either better selling price or more likely, higher profit margins.

The quad core will get HyperTransport 3, but the release date is more tenative. I would expect the quad to go with current HT now and then later ship with HT3. As HT3 will work in HT1 systems, there is no reason for the chip to not have a mixed bag approach, with HT3 inside and HT1 talking to the outside world.

My favorite item above all this was AMD's new modular chip design philosophy. By breaking down the standard components that go into a chip (Core, Caches, Interfaces, etc) they have the ability to quickly modify their base level chip to meet various needs. So in theory and Quad with HT3 and 2MB of L3 for the very high end could be re-tooled with little effort to be a quad with HT1, no L3 cache and a meger amount of L2 cache. The design time would be in essence negligible but the ability to have a QuadFX and SempronQuad for various markets could drastically shift what is expected from a processor vendor.

AMD believe it's next generation will see a 3x improvement in floating point performance. This is one of the last few performance crowns that intel undeniably holds, with a 3x improvement via wider and faster data paths intel may have an even tougher fight than it imagined.

Finally, the base level technology on the next AMD core allows for a maximum of 8 sockets with 4 cores each before adding 'glue' chips to bridge multiple busses together. This means that you could have a workstation or server with 32 available cores for processing, each with a direct HT bus to ALL of the others. 1 hop to go from any processor to any processor and 1 or 2 (maybe only 1) to go from any core to any core. This puts the Opteron in the same class as heavy duty unix systems. Add to this some off the hot swap options that HT3 has you can see why Sun is moving more hardware to AMD.

Further, if you think about this design, each processor has it's own dedicated memory and memory controller. On the Xeon side of the house you might have a few FSB's to work with but they all have to hand off data between each other. This would seem to mean many more hops and far less data throughput.

AMD is gaining market share and increasing earning while intel is reporting declining revenue and sales. Intel will get a significant bump with Core2's release but how long will the sales and mind share last? It really depends on if AMD lives up to what it says it can do. AMD has a good track record. It made the switch to DDR2 with an performance increase, Intel made the switch with a performance decrease. This is likely more a matter of timing rather than design, however AMD managed to increase performance design a processor that thrives on ultra low latency, something DDR2 simply doesn't have.

It remains to be seen what will happen, but should be an interesting time watching.

Okay, 3.0GHz wasn't too hard to hit. I'm still at autovolting, which is always a mistake but it's an easy one for now.

Dropped the HT to 4x and brought the FSB to 250.

This takes the HT bus back to 1000 even.

It boots but I get piles of memory errors.

I dropped the memory base rate to 333 and it ran through MemText86+ without errors on 1 pass, but the memory is back down to DDR400 so although the CPU has gained a lot, the memory has not and that's a bad thing.

Worse, more heat, and worse still, a crash.

HOWEVER, more volts may have help this, but at the expense of more heat, and it really is looking more and more like I need to get a better heat sink.

Dang.

However, if thats the case, then 3.2GHz may be an option. After all, the memory is good up to about DDR470.

So the Ath 4000+ is broken in. It's stable, fun, and just slightly slower out of the gate than my old proc was after overclocking.

This has overclocked very nicely so far. I'm now running at 2.82GHz, 5xHT, DDR400 running at DDR470 @ 2-3-3-5-1T

I've gotten 2.9GHz to boot but either the CPU or the HT isn't stable. The CPU is running on auto-voltage. Currently it's at 1.47. It's a little high. I'm going to back it off and see if that brings the temp down a little on the CPU (45c). It may bring some stability if I have heat induced failure. However if my CPU is failing due to not enough voltage then it should make for some really ugly crashes.

Memory is running at 2.85V and is very stable up to just under 2.9GHz. I've got enough room to go to 2.9V but thats the end. I'm likely better off dropping my timings down a little or reducing the HT.

Guess we'll see. Personally, I'm loving the extra speed.

Some of this is my speculation from what I heard, other parts are fact. I'll try to make it clear below when it's a guess.

All AMD DDR2 based chips will be 64bit capable. There will no longer be 32bit only chips from that point forward. The 939 and older sockets may have 32bit only chips, but thats it. With AMD moving to stable image platforms, you'll get support for whatever socket you buy for a good range of time.

AMD has a tentative date of 2007 for release of an upgraded platform. This will include 2X PCI-Express (generation 2) and wireless USB among other things.

Vista needs 512MB of ram to run, but 1GB is the recommended minimum. 512MB will be painful. If you have integrated graphics and have a 512MB system, Vista will need 448MB just to boot. Otherwise the OS can't run, so watch your graphics use, but better still, 1GB.

Your 3d card should be DX9 with 128MB of Ram for Vista.

The new sockets are M1 for Mobile, AM2 for desktop, and F for Server. The socket F will work for everything from single core to quad core and from 1 way servers through 8 way servers. This means AMD will have 1 socket / chipset combo for it's entire server line in 2006, where as intel will have about 11.

AMD will also go 1 socket for all on the desktop, so your budget, workstation, gamer, business class machines will all use the same socket. This should make starting cheap and growing a lot easier as you'll no longer need a mobo upgrade.

Microsoft will continue to license software on a per Socket basis, not per core basis. Hey Oracle, great idea huh? Larry? You listening?

Sempron's will go dual core AFTER Athlon's go Quad Core.

Vista will release to OEM's in November with release in January.

You can use a thumb drive to speed up Vista. No idea how it does this, I'd guess it acts as a mostly static data cache.

Vista will upgrade from a 64bit OS (xp64) but requires a clean install to go from 32bit.

X2 – 5200 will release in Q3. Note, Q3 begins as early as June 1. Hmmm...

Now the real questionable rumor part... nVidia will have a new chipset potentially with or very early on in the release of AM2.

Conroe beats AMD in artificial benchmarks but real work performance will still be lead by AMD is what AMD is saying. Depends on what real-world tasks you are talking about is my guess. I suspect that as you add cores and processors to a mobo AMD will pull away from intel as intel tends to get less and less benefit per CPU you add.

AMD will support DDR3 when it makes sense, much like they did DDR2. The same goes for HT3.0. When the system begins getting contention they'll upgrade to this, or if they have another reason, like moving to advanced blade servers or something (thats my guessing).

AMD will beat intel's next gen when they move to 65nm. Intel required 65nm and 45nm in order to aid in reducing power, AMD not needing those jump and meeting most of intel's efforts at 90nm will beat them to death at the lower designs. That's AMD PR saying this, but it does seem reasonable.

The tech tour had a lot of interesting things in it, I've included a few items in the Overclocking forum, check it out here.

These are some other pictures that I took. I need to collect my notes still. I'll post more news in the Overclocking forum soon. Check over there, better still, join up.


A 2 way 1U server, or a 4 way 2U server?. The block slot between the two CPU sockets is used to connect a 2-way daughter card bring the server up to 4-way. The copper things in the upper left are heat sinks. Believe it or not, each CPU uses a maximum of 95watts. Nice.


Three mother boards from Gigabyte. Do you know what the difference is between Athlon and Opteron is? If you want multi-cpu on your mobo, you need to go Opteron. Athlon is for singles only.



A nifty 1U from Tyan. Again, even multi-core cpu's only take 95watts. So you don't need massive cooling. These will only ever be dual core as you wont get quad-core until AM2 or Socket F (server line).


The Tech Tour stage before the show got started. The Vista presentation and Office 12/2007 demos were pretty interesting. The next MS Office looks like a must have. Finally an interface that doesn't suck.


Lets get one thing straight: If you're not a booth babe, please keep your shirt buttoned! Despite this, check out Antec's P180 case. Function over form. It doesn't get much more boring than this, but look at the nice layout. PSU on the bottom, easy release drive bays with fans for that all important airflow. A good case if you can get past the 'booth babe.'


Now this is a case! Dual 120 fans for massive air, good size drive bays with fans, but check out the dual black ports in the bottom left, it's ready for water cooling. It's also got enough room to run Quad-Sli. Plus room for 4 opticals and a fan controller or sound-breakout box.


But Antec still walks away a winner. A simple easy to read PSU tester. I didn't get to see it in action, but you know it would make your life easier!

AND FINALLY------
From the "Anything is portable if you put a handle on it" file:

A portable Opteron server. Reminds me of the old Osborne days. It's actually pretty nifty, but it still struck me as funny.

That's it for the slide show, next week I'll make you look at my vacation slides....  bring a book, I'll bore you!

(sorry for the low quality pics, the flash died.)

I've been building systems for few years now, and every time I've built one I've wondered if I could have done it more affordably. Let's face it, with cheap emachines, dells and compaqs. You have to wonder about the viability of building your own machine from scratch.

So, with that in mind, I decided to build my wife's machine starting with an off the shelf discount PC. What I purchased was a Compaq SR1710NX for $200 after rebates. What I got was an AMD Sempron 3400+ (64bit), CD-RW/DVD reader, Win XP home, ATi graphics card, 256MB of CL3 memory, 100GB Sata drive, a case, 250watt power supply, card reader, keyboard, mouse and a pile of software. My only restriction on this build was to keep it in the same case. Why? The little XpH sticker is on the side, it's supposed to look like a store bought, why not see what we can do? So, no new case, and while we at it, no heavy mods to the case. And of course, the goal here is budget, so no fancy external power supply or water cooling.

The first thing I did was rip out the 100GB Sata drive. It's too small, so I put in a 250GB Sata drive I had just bought for $60 after rebates. reinstalled the OS on that drive, then removed the pile of junk software that came with it. After that, the machine actually seemed pretty good. Of course the single drive wasn't going to cut it, so I decided to add the other 250GB Sata drive I had.

PROBLEM. You can kinda slam another drive in the case, but it doesn't fit well and it's airflow is even worse. For that matter the first drive wasn't cooling so well either. That green plastic on the top is the real nemesis. It's designed to make adding devices easy. Adding a DVD writer (CDR's don't cut it any more) was really easy. However sticking a drive using the same mechanism means it hangs way out the back except for the bottom (right) most position. I had plans for the grate.

Did I mention the 250watt power supply? PROBLEM. Yeah, kind of out of power already. We're okay provided the machine is in low power mode and only running at about 900MHz, but under a load, that doesn't look really reliable. Besides, this machine is going to be used for digital photography. So I need to add yet another hard drive. I happened to have a 200GB Pata drive that I got for $40 after rebates.

PROBLEM. There's no other place to put another hard drive, but looking at the card reader, I think I can re-route some of the cables in the system and semi-force another drive in. Sorry no pictures. The drive fits in but hangs way-way out. In order to get the machine to boot, I remove power to the optical drives.

Watching a system monitor I see the drive temp creep up to 63c. The drive's max operating temp is 65c and I really don't want to hit that. So, out come the drives.

I hadn't taken a temp reading of the drive before. It was hot to the touch, but that happens way before 63c.

Okay, so we're going to need more memory, a bigger power supply, and some sort of cooled drive caddy. And some how manage to fit it in that tiny space in the right most section of the picture. Sadly, the size of the case limits us to how we can position the drives. We're limited to either three stacked or three tipped on their side. Both just happen to be about the same size. Time to do a little shopping and see what I can come up with.

Home Depot to the rescue! These blue electrical plates are just about the same width as a drive, and using two of them I can mount the drives sideways, which should help with the heat a little, and thanks to the holes at the end, I can rig a fan to the front.

The fan on the front is 80mm but it's thinner than average. It's only 15mm deep instead of 25. This extra space is needed because of the lack of space in the case. A 25mm width would have put the fan into the back of the power button. If I can find a 90mm fan I'll upgrade to it. I need a little more airflow still. This setup brought my drive temps down to 30's. The worst off drive is the one facing the inside corner of the case. There is no other airflow back there. Although the fan is keeping one side of the drive cool, a 90 that can just hang over the edge of the drive would give me a little more air flow. Another option would be to mod the side of the case for some air flow. This might be a better long term idea. The only real downside here is that that side of the case is fixed. So modding it means drilling and cutting while the case is assembled. Count on messy lines and the need for a good grill to hide them. That will happen in version two of this case.

I've got just enough room to rig this into the case. But I mean JUST enough room. I should have picked shorter screws. It would have made the job a lot easier. While I'm here, I should have used a third screw to reduce swing access across the two screws holding the caddy. Next time. Still, I've got the drives in they are at a reasonable temp. It's not going to break off even if I cart it around town, but you wouldn't want to go bouncing around two often just the same. You can see the grate at the bottom was used to mount the caddy.

 

The power supply is too small, but I was upgrading the power supply in another machine, and also needed a small ps for a mythbox project. So, the machine got my old 500 watt power supply. That should be more than enough now for this machine. By the way, notice that the old PS had only 20 pins to supply the board, the other 4 are empty, who knew? After finding the nifty little release tab I had the old PS out and my new/used one in.
It fit perfectly (mostly)! Of course, it was a 20 pin. If they can do it, I can do it. Just don't put a 16x graphic card in without putting in a handy dandy 20 to 24 pin adapter.

So, the power supply is in ($30), the new memory is in ($66), and the drive caddy ($5) is in. It's looking pretty good, oh yeah, she needs two monitors.

Time to break out that old Nvidia PCI TNT2 card. It's a tight fit, a really tight fit. But it does fit. I've got enough room here to actual add maybe another .5cm to the card. Which gives me a little more room to mount the drives if I need a bigger fan, but at that point installing or changing everything becomes more and more challenging. As it is, I have to remove the video card to make any changes to the hard drive.

So now my wife has a Sempron 64 3400+ with 700GB of storage, 1GB of Ram, a legal copy of Xp Home, a card reader, decent optical drives, two monitors, and everything she needs to run her business.

Final cost:

+$200 - the computer
+$120 - 2 Sata 250GB Drives
-$40 - the old Sata drive
+$30 - replacement PS
-$15 - 250Watt PS
+$66 - 2 sticks of Corsair Valueram.
-$14 - 1 stick bozo ram.
+$9 - drive caddy
+$20 - PCI graphics card

Final Total: $376

It's not bad, it's bigger than what you could get off the rack, but pretty affordable just the same. Note I didn't include any shipping prices in here. If you want to add that, figure another $20 on top. Of course, I had parts laying around, and uses for the parts I removed. If you add those back in your up to $445. It's not a perfect system, one of the drives gets up to 40c which is too hot for my taste. I'll have to do some real case modding to improve the airflow around it. Speaking of cases, this case is very custom, the card reader and various front ports will need modding to fit into anything else. That fact alone makes me pretty happy with my 'must keep the case' restriction. Moving the card reader would have been a huge pain. This is non-standard all the way. However it started out at $200. Even if you take away the rebate it was $250. If you figure your XpH cost is $80 and your processor cost is somewhere around $130. Your starting off with all the key items at what it would have cost you to get the whole machine in the first place.

Okay so this REALLY is not about overclocking firefox. I did (in a sense) in that now I can download a lot more file from one server before FF hits it's limit.

Type about:config in the address bar, you can change anything there. Of course you run the risk of screwing it up, but now you know.

The real reason for the title is that I wanted to put up my overclock log. However firefox in order to protect me, will not let me cut and paste something in here. There are descriptions on how to fix this, but I'm missing some key point because as of yet, I can't figure it out.

So I'm stuck using IE (IEEEEEEEEEE!) if I want to cut and paste easily. And using IEEEEE! means I'll likely get stuck in another further less pleasant way.

Ah well....


So, I'm learning, I posted a comment with this, thinking maybe it would show up. Nope... here's the lines...

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "allowclipboard");
user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.sites", "http://www.gamespot.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.cutcopy", "allAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.paste", "allAccess");

These goes in the prefs.js file that is located deeper than where they say the user.js should be. This might be an issue with FF 1.5 and the help being for 1.0x.   Just do a search for prefs.js.

Mine was located at:
 C:\Documents and Settings\PROFILENAMEHERE\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\RANDOMCHARACTERSHERE.default


If you don't have one, just create it and use the lines above. Should work.

Since my first rant about studios and props departments, I've since played Quake 4 and COD2. It seems that both studios are taking this to heart. Quake 4 brought to you buy the same folks that created the Elite Forces series seems to have taken at the very least design ideas from EF and used them for some of the Strogg equipment in Q4.

This is great, not that I want to see recycled props, but the more variety of objects in a world, the more realistic a world then becomes.

Compare Land Of The Dead Road to Fiddler's Green to Quake 4, it's more than Q4 having a better engine, it's the level of detail to the objects in the world, it's variety of objects in the world.

Doom was better than Wolf3d because it had serious geometrical diversity, Not just room after room with the same pile of trash in various corners.

COD2 offers the same graphical jump you expect from a version 1 to a version 2, but you can see common props, the radio being a great example, the texture looks better (though I haven't compared the two side by side) but otherwise the radio is about the same as it was in the first game, other objects are the same way, yet you've got a new and more detailed world, and clearly not having to re-create the radio saves time that can be put to other stuff.

I'd rather the time be spent in creating a compelling story, better ai, and compelling world than to recreate the same object over and over again.

Here's hope!

Want a thought? Here's one. Game Studio's need their own props department. Items created should be done in such a way that they don't have to be recreated each time for each new engine or iteration..

How many times does a coffee cup need to be recreated for a shooter? Want to save development time. Build the good one, then dumb it down for your polygon budget.

The analog here is TV/Film production. They use the same junk over and over again. There's one prop you see all over the place in SciFi. It's this long bar looking thing with red and yellow flashing lights. It's been in the Buck Rogers TV series, Star Trek: TNG, and Airplane II just to name a few.

The point is, when they needed something in the background, they already had it on hand.