The Agena looks nice, But why all of socket changes.It still bugs me that they did away with 939's.
If you remember AM2 was to be AM3 compatible;with K8L introducing another versin of htt Am2+ was needed because the am2 boards are only capable of htt1 ,and AM3 will be ddr3 pcie2 as well as htt3.
suffice it to say AM2 was kneejerk garbage and will never be a competitive socket.Ever.They may have originally thought am2 could be outfitted for upgradeability.Well they have since found out like the rest of us,all am2 is is a repackaged 939 capable of choking the hell out of an am2+ chip.
When looking at it from the perspective of someone who already owned a S939 board/processor, of course AM2 looks redundant. When you look at it from other perspectives though it is not bad at all. Anyone who was coming to an AMD processor from something other than a S939 board, if they kept 939 until this summer, was buying into a dead end right before a new core. With changing the socket to AM2, it allows for any newcomers to the platform to be able to upgrade through the next generation of cores (with a performance hit for hypertransport 1 vs 2, etc), avoiding the need for a new motherboard. As far as I can tell, its really 6 in one and half a dozen in the other. Sure it didnt need to be changed and may have hurt older customers futureproofing somewhat, but at the same time it helped newer customers futureproofing.
Aside from the futureproofing it offers, I think a lot of the reasons lie in the fact that AMD is a company that makes stepped upgrades, not huge jumps like Intel. When Intel releases a new core, it is a big thing. A lot of the time it acompanies a new socket, chipset, manufacturing process, etc. AMD on the other hand takes things in baby steps to prevent and real big hiccups. I wouldnt be supprised if at least one reason behind moving to AM2 when they did is to get used to the new socket when you are not changing everything else, making it an easier transition technologywise. I know its not quite the same as AM2+, but I bet its pretty darn close.
On top of that kinda reason, I think there was also a decent market pressure from RAM manufacturers to move away from DDR to DDR2. Im going off memory here (pardon the pun) but I believe that as AM2 was coming in memory mfg's were saying how they wanted to push DDR2 and stop producing so much DDR memory. If you sit on S939 until this summer instead of support DDR2 when they did, there could very well be a backlash from memory producers or a shortage of DDR supply for the computers they are trying to push.
Just my two cents...
PS Im not an AMD fanboy, so please try to keep from saying it. My computer has a core 2 duo under the hood and I am quite pleased, but I still think that AMD's socket transitions have been a little misunderstood.
:roll:
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