DID AMD DELIBERATELY DELAY ATHLON 64 DDR-II?

ltcommander_data

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Dec 16, 2004
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Contrary to people's beliefs, I'm not going to flame you.

I just found that article a little bit rich, especially since it was The Inquirer themself who first reported that AM2 was delayed because of a memory controller bug.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29776

The thing is, does this mean that there was never a memory controller bug? If there wasn't I'd be very interested to see an alternative explanation of why the AM2 system evaluated by THG performed so poorly other than "THG rigged it".

Just thought I might also point out that just yesterday Anandtech reported that the memory controller does exist and persist.

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2709

The second spin of the AM2, widely called DVT or DeVelopmenT, combined with the latest NVIDIA MCP55, Rev. A02 or the ATI RD580, is widely reported to bring AM2 performance very close to Socket 939 levels. The earlier EVT chip fell far short of Socket 939 performance levels.

It appears that an issue remains with the latest DVT AM2 in that single channel and dual-channel memory performance are virtually the same on the latest DVT spin. If this is corrected, AMD may finally see the performance gains that they told the industry to expect with the move to AM2 and DDR2. Another AM2 spin is expected in the next few days, and until performance is more representative of the final shipping product, AMD likely does not want benchmarks leaving the wrong impression.

It's only my speculation of course, and I've said it previously but it's possible that there was a memory controller bug with the original DDR2 667 memory controllers. Since AMD had to delay to fix it anyways, they probably just took the opportunity to finalize DDR2 800 support. DDR2 800 was always supposed to come to AM2 anyways, it was just a matter of whether it would be available at launch.
 

hergieburbur

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I think its more the memory controller bug as well. I have been mentioing that everytime someone mentions AM2's poor benchmark results as if they were going to stay that way.

FTR, I am not usually that impressed with the Inquirer as a source of info.
 

scoobertscoobydoo

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beta drivers...


when crossfire was first out, the reviews looked like crap, heck 2 were slower then one. but when the drivers were updated, now its about as fast as sli.

so with AM2 beta VS. release we will see a big diff.
 

3Ball

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