AMD announes new server chipset for Shanghai

AMD Zone is reporting that AMD is working on a new server chipset that uses HT3 and perhaps DDR3. I think this is their best choice as though Braodcom and nVidia have great chipsets, it can only help for them to do a server chipset also. I mean, supposedly Power 7 will fit into the next Opteron socket so they can do low end chipsets for that if IBM is agreeable.

Here's the link.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2 [...] ml?hpg1=bn

Is this a good thing?

Quick question, and not to give you a hard time like some people think I do, but what does the chipset have to do with what type of memory Shanghai will use if the memory controller is on the CPU itself?

Now I understand the HT3 being dependant on the mobo, Phenoms already support HT3 but the current mobos hold them back at HT3.

Now if we takr from the last change from DDR to DDR2 I am doubting the desktop market will see a change in performance. The server market however should see a great jump since this will offer much more memory bandwidth.

^I never said Deneb itself wouldn't increase the Phenoms performance. Heck I am sure it will at least put it on par with Kentsfield and on the heels of Yorksfield.

What I am saying is that the move to DDR3 will more than likely hold little to no benefit just like the move to DDR2 held very littleperformance increase.

The reason why the move from DDR to DDR2 didn't hold that much benefit is because the IMC that AMD had already took advantage of all the bandwidth needed for the system. The same will be in the move to DDR3.

Now it may change in time when DDR3 gets lowe latencies like say CAS 5 like current DDR2 stands but at the current timings and highest bandwidth I don't see much of a performance increase with just the move to DDR3.

Very good point

Hmmm nice find, that kind of confirms what I was thinking would happen, when they were talking about getting higher IPC and performance out of shanghai. The switch to DDR3, and HT3 on the server side should allow it to compete with Nehalem when it comes out there. Now just need to confirm whether they're tying the L3 speed to the core speed, or whether it's still tied to the NB/IMC speed. And if thats the case, whether or not the new nb/imc is running at higher clocks to allow for full HT3 speeds.

and after that expect all hell to break loose here on the forums.

Though the L3 is slower than L2 it's still alot faster than main memory, so it does in fact increase data rates for the L2, but mainly in multi-threaded cases. Single threaded apps may not benefit at all from increasing the speed increase because it's an eviction cache (is loaded from L2). Loads go directly to L1 in K10 if I remember correctly so L3 isn't the route from main memory.

That's why DDR3 may help Shanghai moreso than Deneb as more server loads are tightly multi-threaded and can benefit from the additional bandwidth, especially web-servers.