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Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about any dirty tricks or paying OEMs to include their products or the like. I'm talking about Sockets and processor support on motherboards. One thing AMD ever since ditching the Socket 7 CPU models has been famous for is a different socket for different product generations, and even switching in the middle of a product's life (S754->S939). I'm sure there are architectural reasons behind these changes and why are they needed, however Intel seems to have managed pretty well and for some time now they've been using the LGA775 socket in a wide range of products (from Pentium 4's to their latest Quad Cores, that sums up 4 different generations [P4, Pentium D, Core 2 Duo, Quad]), from the looks of it this has enabled Intel to have a more stable "mixed" environment and to empower their users to be able to upgrade and be forward compatible. For instance you could get a motherboard with a certain CPU and get a newer model down the road and the motherboard will accept that. Maybe without all the features, giving the user a more gradual upgrade path, and upgrade the motherboard down the road to a newer one which makes better use of the CPU.
On the AMD side, it seemed it was going to be the case with the introduction of the AM2 socket, but it wasn't until this socket that they attempted this (that I can remember, anyway), as before this there ware Socket A for the XP line of products, S754 for the first generation Athlon64, S939 for the "second generation" of Athlon64 (were these the "New Castle arch?") and finally AM2 for the dual core CPUs. With Spider they are also inroducing yet another socket type, AM3, apparently pin-identical to AM2, but with fundamental changes, especially to Hyper Transport (and memory & IRQ management, I believe). This is good, as at least they have announced that Phaeton CPUs will be compatible with current AM2 sockets and AM3.
The situation about different sockets for different products has had the effect that AMD upgrades seem to be "more expensive" than Intel's as usually a change in CPU also implies a change in socket and thus motherboard. While Intel users have been able to upgrade more gradually for some time now. With the recent AM2->AM3 it would appear as if AMD has adopted a similar strategy, I hope they indeed have... It would look like for AMD socket configuration represents something analogous to Linux's "kernel API", i.e they don't have a "stable one"
On the AMD side, it seemed it was going to be the case with the introduction of the AM2 socket, but it wasn't until this socket that they attempted this (that I can remember, anyway), as before this there ware Socket A for the XP line of products, S754 for the first generation Athlon64, S939 for the "second generation" of Athlon64 (were these the "New Castle arch?") and finally AM2 for the dual core CPUs. With Spider they are also inroducing yet another socket type, AM3, apparently pin-identical to AM2, but with fundamental changes, especially to Hyper Transport (and memory & IRQ management, I believe). This is good, as at least they have announced that Phaeton CPUs will be compatible with current AM2 sockets and AM3.
The situation about different sockets for different products has had the effect that AMD upgrades seem to be "more expensive" than Intel's as usually a change in CPU also implies a change in socket and thus motherboard. While Intel users have been able to upgrade more gradually for some time now. With the recent AM2->AM3 it would appear as if AMD has adopted a similar strategy, I hope they indeed have... It would look like for AMD socket configuration represents something analogous to Linux's "kernel API", i.e they don't have a "stable one"
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