[hoom]

http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showp...3&postcount=30

Originally Posted by JF-AMD

I am JF-AMD, not JF-ASUS. Please ask ASUS instead. They are the one saying that they will support it. All I can say is that AMD is not supporting BD in AM3 sockets.

[eastmen]

Originally Posted by AlexV

If it doubles your rendering times, it's quite crap....

lol u know what i mean !

[almighty]

I was joyed when I found out that my ASUS Crosshair 4 Extreme would support Bulldozer with nothing more then a BIOS update.

But it seemed too good to be true, So I emailed ASUS and this I got through this morning



Seems that AM3+ WILL work in AM3 sockets

[entity279]

I had the impression this had been known for months. Nonetheless, it is also expected that some features will be lost with BD on AM3 MB (probably thing like aggressive power management or who knows what)

[I.S.T.]

I think it's going to be on a case by case basis, and not officially supported by AMD.

[almighty]

It hadn't been known for months at all, ASUS have no only ever said AM3+ support, They're never actually said BULLDOZER support until my email.

[Svensk Viking]

It's nice to see Asus supporting Bulldozer on their capable AM3 motherboards, and not being too cheap to bother

But from what I have read, it seems that only Asus has AM3+ support on their AM3 motherboards, Gigabyte and the others seem to actually have AM3+ sockets

I feel left out though, I'm sitting on a Gigabyte whose revision is too old


I don't see the point with supporting AM3 processors on AM3+ motherboards and not AM3+ processors on AM3 motherboards though...
I think the majority had wanted to get a Bulldozer CPU in their old current motherboards, instead of getting an AM3+ motherboard and have their old CPU in it

[Tahir2]

Intel = Socket 1366, 1156, 1155 and the not quite dead 775.

Intel make a decent profit from motherboard chipset sales. I am glad AMD is jumping on the bandwagon. As JF-AMD also explained it would have meant more expense to fully support BD on AM3 and a delay.

[Svensk Viking]

What exactly have Asus done to support Bulldozer on their newer motherboards then?

I can't see it being that expensive for AMD to have Bulldozer support for at least the later AM3 motherboards, given that Asus has support for the CPUs, despite AMD saying it needs the new socket

[Tahir2]

Ask Asus!

It still saves AMD from having to test and validate their 8 series chipset for BD at any rate.

[hoom]

Other manufacturers have 8 series AM3+ mobos, so the chipset is qualified.
They are new revisions with the AM3+ socket though eg Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H

Version 3.0 has AM3 socket

Version 3.1 has black coloured AM3+ socket, otherwise identical

[karlotta]

so the "+"socket , does have a extra pin slot.

[hoom]

I expect that there is something like the 'Thuban in AM2+ socket' situation where the older format missed out on turbo (or was it Cool'nQuiet?) working properly.

Presumably with Bulldozer the difference creates a more severe handicap which would look bad on launch reviews etc so they decided not to support that?

[Blazkowicz]

Originally Posted by hoom

Other manufacturers have 8 series AM3+ mobos, so the chipset is qualified.
They are new revisions with the AM3+ socket though eg Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H

Version 3.0 has AM3 socket
http://gigabyte.com/fileupload/product/2/3756/3894.jpg
Version 3.1 has black coloured AM3+ socket, otherwise identical
http://gigabyte.com/fileupload/product/2/3785/4029.jpg

that mobo has a great slots layout and has everything including a serial port header.
only lacks a IOMMU to be the most versatile mobo ever.

[Chabi]

Originally Posted by hoom

I expect that there is something like the 'Thuban in AM2+ socket' situation where the older format missed out on turbo (or was it Cool'nQuiet?) working properly.

I have DDR2 and AM2 + motherboards (AM3 ready), Gigabyte UD3-MA770 rev 2.0 and a 1075 X6 Thuban processors. Works perfectly with the CNQ, C1E and also TurboCore

[hoom]

Hmm, I thought there was something to do with multiple power planes that AM2+ didn't support?
Or was that AM2 -> AM2+

that mobo has a great slots layout

Yeah it is nice. I've got a V1.0 with my Thuban in it.
I had been going to get an FX model for the IOMMU but heck if I'm gonna pay an extra NZ$100 (about 1/3 premium) for that while losing the onboard GPU.

[swaaye]

Well my AM2+ boards don't have the ACC overclock feature but that's it. I have a GF 8200 board and some 780G+SB700 boards around. You need SB750 or later for ACC and that was a later AM2+ chipset so it's probably not very popular.

You can even put AM3 chips in some original AM2 boards. The Gigabyte MA74GM-S2H (740G + SB700) (CPU list) can run almost all AMD CPUs as long as you don't go beyond what the VRMs can handle. However in this case the HT bus drops to the classic 2000 MT/s rate. In practice I think this is mostly detrimental to IGPs because they have so little bandwidth for their memory access.

[Blazkowicz]

this is what I run, an AM3 Athlon X2 in a vanilla AM2 motherboard. some more power is used because of the lack of a separate voltage rail for the memory controller, this is way AM3 and AM2+ 125W CPUs are incompatible, but all others do work. nobody cared to support 95W phenom II X6, maybe because they are rare CPUs (the lowest retail X6 usually is the 125W 1055T)

[swaaye]

Actually revision 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 4.1 and 4.3 of the MA74GM-S2H do support the X6. So only the original build didn't support it. Lots of revisions. I think they were recently still selling this board.
http://www.gigabyte.com/support-down....aspx?pid=3062

[eastmen]

has any info leaks on what ddr 3 memory speed these will use ?

[Svensk Viking]

MSI too provided AM3+ support through a BIOS update
http://emm.msi.com/display.php?List=44&N=1029

[Lightman]

Originally Posted by Svensk Viking

MSI too provided AM3+ support through a BIOS update
http://emm.msi.com/display.php?List=44&N=1029

Things are getting more and more interesting .

Who's right? AMD saying no Bulldozer for AM3 or board manufactures offering Bulldozer enabling BIOS upgrades for their AM3 boards?

[hoom]

Dresdenboy found the official programming guide for Bulldozer.

Amongst the bits officially stated there is Speculative Execution.
I thought that had been written off as pie-in-the-sky stuff?

[MfA]

Data speculation is generally pie in the sky ... speculative execution is pretty much standard on most processors though (can't really do branch prediction without it, since you can obviously predict wrong).

[Npl]

Originally Posted by hoom

Dresdenboy found the official programming guide for Bulldozer.

Amongst the bits officially stated there is Speculative Execution.
I thought that had been written off as pie-in-the-sky stuff?

As soon you (mis)predict branches you have "Speculative Execution".
I think you meant "reverse hyper threading" (I doubt theres an official term there is for this since no one would seriously consider it), where multiple paths are executed concurrently on several cores/threads?