AMD Brings Back Semprons & Athlons With The 2014 AM1 Platform

[curaga]

How often you upgrade CPU in a single generation? I've only ever upgraded systems after 2-3 generations, otherwise its impossible to justify.

AMD sockets. They support that 2-3 generations with a single socket, allowing you to do such upgrades between generations.

There is however a limit to how much performance one can squeeze out of a device without having to adjust the external interfaces. It will be most interesting to see what the next generation of AM1 socketed chips will look like.

Dual-channel RAM is not that much of a limit. Consider socket 754, a previous single-channel AMD socket. Compare one of the last cpus for that, Athlon 64 3700+, a single-core made on 130nm in 2005 - it beats the 5350 by 5% in integer math single-threaded.

If a core with that outdated tech can beat it, using comparable external interfaces, there can easily be a doubling of performance using the AM1 socket.

[chithanh]

Compare one of the last cpus for that, Athlon 64 3700+, a single-core made on 130nm in 2005 - it beats the 5350 by 5% in integer math single-threaded.

Since when is integer math performance limited by memory bandwidth? You may want to come up with better arguments.

The 2.4GHz single core Athlon 64 3700+ built on SOI process had a 89W TDP (not counting Northbridge and Southbridge) according to Wikipedia. The 2.05GHz Athlon 5350 is a quad-core SoC built on TSMC bulk process that has a 25W TDP. Somewhere, compromises have to be made.

If a core with that outdated tech can beat it, using comparable external interfaces, there can easily be a doubling of performance using the AM1 socket.

The "external interface" of Socket 754 is not at all comparable to the AM1 platform.

[curaga]

CPU performance was the topic, not memory-bound tasks. So integer perf is entirely relevant.