This is silly, how many socket types does one line of processors
require? Will there be a socket 941 next week?
This has been discussed before, but to sum up briefly:
- Originally all Athlon64 processors were to be socket 754, that's it,
that's all. Socket 940 would be used for all Opteron processors and
never the two shall meet
- Then a few months before the Athlon64 was released, dual-channel
memory became a checkmark feature that all high-end systems needed to
have. Socket 754 wouldn't cut it and AMD needed something quick.
Easy solution: take an Opteron and sell it as a desktop chip in socket
940.
- For the long-term though, AMD needed a proper solution, one designed
for dual-channel memory for the desktop. The result is socket 939.
That should be it for sockets for the entire K8 line-up. 3 sockets
actually isn't all that bad, especially if you compare it to Intel's
P4/Xeon line. They started with Socket 423 for the desktop and Socket
603 for workstations/server. Then moved to Socket 474 for the
desktop/laptop and socket 604 for workstations/servers. In another
couple months they'll move to a totally new socket 775 for desktops
(and laptops?), and they may have another new socket for servers soon.
The PIII was even worse though, since it actually had three different
and not-quite-compatible Socket 370s as well as Slot 1, not to mention
Slot 2 for servers. AMD's old Athlon chips also went through a few
revisions, first going from Slot A to Socket A and then changing the
voltage and bus speed sufficiently that old socket A boards couldn't
handle new chips.
Long story short, socket changes are the norm, not the exception. AMD
having only 3 sockets for a processor core isn't too bad.
Quote:
The FX-53 and 3500+, 3700+ and 3800+ include the Sunnyvale, Calif.,
company's Enhanced Virus Protection technology, which will be enabled
with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP Service Pack 2 release later this year
and is designed to add another layer of protection to desktops and
notebooks.
/Qoute
This is also absurd. CPU's should not be engineered to solve MS design
deficiencies.
Again, this has been discussed at length, but the short version of
this is that it's a feature that *SHOULD* have been in the processor
long ago. x86 was one of a very small number of high-end
architectures that doesn't already have this feature (except in
segmentation, and there's already a big flame-war going on about that
is this newsgroup!).
It's not just for Windows either, Linux and some of the BSD's already
make use of this security feature in their x86-64 distributions. Of
course, calling it "Virus Protection" is a total misnomer, it won't do
a thing to stop viruses. What it will help prevent is worms and
hacking attempts through buffer overruns. However the difference
between a "virus" and a "worm" has been pretty much lost on the
mainstream media, let along the general public.
