The Mother of All CPU Charts Part 2

Socket 940: September 2003 To March 2004

Probably the shortest-lived AMD socket was Socket 940, which existed for six months. The first 64 bit CPU from AMD was presented in September 2003, after an 18-month delay, in southern France, which rather upset AMD's planning. From this point on, AMD succeeded in losing its reputation as a manufacturer of cheap CPUs.

While Socket 754 was intended for use with desktops, Socket 940 was meant to be reserved for the server and workstation market. Because of its extreme delay in coming to the market, the performance in interaction with Socket 754 was no longer enough, so Socket 940 moved briefly with its integrated dual-channel memory interface to the desktop market. Curiously enough, the Athlon64, which has SSE2, appeared in a ceramic package. As a special feature, the CPU has a hyper transport channel that allows it to exchange data with the chipset or with another CPU up to a bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s.

But to the disadvantage of the user, the CPU only worked with registered memory, and very few boards were available. Only two chipsets were offered: NVIDIA's nForce 3 150 and VIA's K8T800.

In March 2004 the last Athlon64 FX for Socket 940 was introduced and disappeared from the desktop. All CPUs were based on a 130-nm process.

The Athlon64 FX for Socket 940, and the Opteron server version

Article Links:

• Athlon64 FX-53
• Athlon64 FX-51