AMD moves on to Socket 939

Today AMD removed the muzzle for the media regarding their new
Athlon 64-platform. The new platform which goes by the name Socket 939 is big
step towards uniting the AMD64-architecture on the desktop market. Earlier on
both Socket 754 and Socket 940 (Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX) have been present on
the desktop market but now its time for Socket 939 to take over. Socket 754 will
still be available on the market for some time but primarily as low budget
options (e.g. Athlon XP).

AMD launches three new processors today, Athlon
64 3800+, Athlon 64 3500+ and Athlon 64 FX53. All three uses the new Socket
939-interface. The differences between these and earlier Athlon 64-processors
are that the regular Athlon 64-series now has support for dualchannel DDR which
only Athlon 64 FX has been enriched with on the desktop market. At the same time
as they have doubled the theoretical bandwidth of the Athlon 64-versions they
also cut the L2 cache to a mere 512 KB. AMD are not concerned though. The
support for dualchannel DDR will be more than enough to compensate the loss of
L2 cache.
Athlon 64 FX ”lost” a pin with this new upgrade and this removes
the need for registered DDR-SDRAM. Now you can use regular “unbuffered”-memory
modules with the Athlon 64 FX. This will result in a bit lower latency thus a
small increase in performance. Above this the Socket 939 version of the Athlon
64 FX53 doesn’t have any differences towards the earlier launched Socket 940
version.

The frequencies are 2.2 GHz for the Athlon 64 3500+ while Athlon
64 3800+ and Athlon 64 FX53 runs at 2.4 GHz.

We are currently testing how
the new Socket 939-processors performs against their predecessors. Alas we can’t
offer you our review yet since we don’t feel that we can give you all the
information on the Socket 939 we have gathered during the short time we have had
the boards in our testlab. We will keep working with our Socket 939 review to
give you a wide overview of AMD’s new platform.

We hope that you won’t
hold a grudge against us but look forward to a thorough review in a nearby
future instead.

Until then there are some interesting reviews on the web
that might ease the pain somewhat. Below you can see a list of sites that have
reviewed the new platform.

:: Anandtech ::
The
Tech Report :: HardOCP :: Tomshardware ::
Ace’s Hardware ::
HotHardware
:: X-bit
Labs :: Beyond 3D ::
AMD
Zone :: PCPerspective
:: HardTech4U
::