Biostar Reveals Lineup of Socket AM1 Motherboards
Biostar has announced three socket AM1 motherboards.
Biostar has announced a triplet of socket AM1 motherboards, which are also the first AM1 motherboards the company has built. The three motherboards are largely identical to each other, with a couple of subtle differences.
They'll be known as the AM1MHP, AM1MH and AM1ML. All three motherboards come in the Micro-ATX form factor, though lack one or two expansion slots from the reference format. They all use a 2+1 phase VRM circuit to power the CPU, feature two DDR3 DIMM slots, feature a single PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, a single PCIe 1x slot, and feature two SATA3 ports.
The AM1MHP features an additional PCI slot, which the AM1MH and the AM1ML lack. The AM1MHP and the AM1MH feature VGA and HDMI ports as display outputs, while the AM1ML lacks the HDMI port.
There was no official word on pricing for these motherboards, though we expect them to be very affordable given the objectives AMD has with the AM1 platform.



desktop version were socket 754, 939, 940. Then it went on to socket AM2... up to the current AMD FX, which runs on socket AM3+.
The old FX was called AMD Athlon 64 FX and it ran on socket 940.
True, but all main PC processors are moving to SoC designs anyway. AMD says that the standalone FX CPU's days are numbered, and Intel has said that future chips of theirs will be SoC's as well. The good news with this is that you don't have to repurchase a motherboard if the socket (and voltage) are the same in a future chip upgrade because the board just becomes a cheap chip "dock" for connections and you only have additional chips if there is a need for supplemental connection controllers. Even so, it becomes far less expensive because you no longer have a traditional chipset soldered to the board. The bad news is that Intel says that post-Haswell chips will all be soldered BGA only (which AMD says they're not doing any time soon), so you'll have to buy a new motherboard anyway. What the customer could've gained by getting an entire processor and chipset in one is lost with a soldered design.
I guess it would also depend on whether or not socket AM1 has enough pins to handle that too, right?
*Note to TOM'S*: please do a big review on AM1 when more parts are made available and dig into this question a bit deeper. I'd like to know more about future upgradeability potential with the platform. Some of these questions will undoubtedly come up with higher-end mainstream platforms such as the post-Kaveri A-series SoC's as well as Intel's future mainstream SoC platform.
Thank you, someone remembered this one. Mini-DTX, while not very popular (maybe because it was thought up by AMD?), is NOT really plain Mini-ITX...
Hmm... The answer might be "yes" IF there are enough traces on the motherboard connecting the SoC/CPU/PCIe Controller (depending on how you want to call it) and the PCIe 16x slot.In practice, however, I assume most, if not all, manufacturers will prefer to simply NOT bother with extra traces, which would make the motherboard more expensive to create (both on R&D and actual manufacture, since tracing is rather time consuming, and more traces mean having to also add extra interference protection to the motherboard).
Also, it would depend on the CPU's pinout: PCIe traces need to have somewhere to link to, and if there are not enough pins on the CPU, you might not be able to connect as many traces as you need. This is the reason pinouts on Intel CPUs have been grown quite a bit ever since the PCIe controller was moved to the CPU socket area (and also why there's a limit on the number of PCIe lanes available from the CPU). As far as I can tell, this CPU needs to have traces for PCIe, memory, power, and all sorts of I/O (USB, DVI/HDMI/VGA, SATA, audio, etc.), so my guess is there are not really that many free pins, if any, to add to either the memory or PCIe interfaces.
Which would ultimately mean that, short of a socket change, this is probably as good as this CPU line will get in terms of external interfaces (memory and PCIe). I totally support a review on the AM1 line, though.
Cheers
Miguel
Actually, while the current AM1 APUs can't drive more than 4 PCIe lanes, the socket itself might be able to (though I seriously doubt it). That's where I was going to.
What that means is that, while the current AM1 APUs will never be able to drive more than a PCIe 4x slot directly (and I won't even mention switches), it may well be that the socket allows for expansion, with future AM1 APUs being able to drive more than 4 PCIe lanes.
IF (and that's a big IF) that's the case, AND the motherboard manufacturer actually printed the complete set of pathways (another huge IF, as I've noted before), then there would be an upgrade path to APUs with more expansion capabilities in the future. I wouldn't hold my breath for it, though.
As for 1080p video decoding (I'm assuming video decoding only, since this is clearly not a gaming APU), I'd be shocked if the APU wouldn't be at least as good as the G210/GT220 series, if not even way better. Also, the 200 series is entering EOL status (driver support will end this year), so that's not fun, either.
Cheers.
Miguel
Actually, while the current AM1 APUs can't drive more than 4 PCIe lanes, the socket itself might be able to (though I seriously doubt it). That's where I was going to.
What that means is that, while the current AM1 APUs will never be able to drive more than a PCIe 4x slot directly (and I won't even mention switches), it may well be that the socket allows for expansion, with future AM1 APUs being able to drive more than 4 PCIe lanes.
IF (and that's a big IF) that's the case, AND the motherboard manufacturer actually printed the complete set of pathways (another huge IF, as I've noted before), then there would be an upgrade path to APUs with more expansion capabilities in the future. I wouldn't hold my breath for it, though.
As for 1080p video decoding (I'm assuming video decoding only, since this is clearly not a gaming APU), I'd be shocked if the APU wouldn't be at least as good as the G210/GT220 series, if not even way better. Also, the 200 series is entering EOL status (driver support will end this year), so that's not fun, either.
Cheers.
Miguel
I see where you're coming from now.. Although if they did that, wouldn't it make the current APU's sort of redundant? (If you're using a cheap APU and Mobo with a decent GPU? Provided that the APU doesn't bottleneck the GPU..)
And I have no idea how good these APU's will be, as apparently the laptop equivalents are terrible? I just want to make a cheap Blu-Ray/1080p streaming pc for the TV!
Well, integrated graphics has always been a stopgap solution for video processing. No matter how good IGPs get, dedicated cards will always be better, if nothing else because they can be several times the size, and have MUCH more power pumped into them. So, while it would be a bit odd to add even a low-tier dedicated card to one of these motherboards, as long as the CPU side can keep up (don't expect any miracles, though, this is a low-power part), adding it should increase performance.
Whether you'd WANT to do it, however, is a completely different question... hehe
I don't know this APU too well (still waiting on that review!), it seems to me that this is somewhat of the Atom of the AMD line.
Bad news, Atoms aren't really that good (though they have been getting better) in terms of CPU performance, so these shouldn't be too great, either.
Good news, even the newer Atoms can handle 1080p with no problems, and I seriously doubt these APUs will ship without at least UVD2, so that means you should be able to just slap OpenELEC on it, and get a decent streaming PC (an original ION handles just about everything fine with that OS, though it's missing audio bitstreaming, and a couple of other stuff). Blu-Ray on a Linux-based box might be an issue, though, but W7 with an external Blu-Ray player should work just fine.