Price Guides, August 2005: Labor Day CPUs
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Howard Johnston on September 4, 2005 4:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron
We still haven't seen the Opteron 154, 254, and 854 processors hitting the retail channels yet. Expect to start seeing those in the near future. It's our understanding that OEM's are already shipping these chips inside their high end systems, so it seems as though the retail lag is just a bit higher than usual.
Furthermore, Socket 939 Opterons started to ping up on our radar as well. Again, we have OEMs that are shipping Socket 939 single Opteron in workstations already, but the retail market continues to lag. Taiwanese motherboard OEMs are just starting to get their act together with nForce4 Professional, so even if you had a Socket 939 Opteron to play with, the motherboard support isn't quite there yet anyway.
This week we saw several large price drops in the higher end Opteron processors. The Opteron 870 Egypt [RTPE: OSA870FKA6BS] shows the largest price drop most likely due to increased supply of OEM parts.
There has been little fluctuation in the world of Xeon for a long time. However, we just picked up some pretty substantial price cuts on several Xeon parts. We're not sure if they're permanent cuts (as they're mostly from one store, Allstarshop.com) or if they're Labor Day sales. If you're in the market for Xeon, though, all of the Xeon Irwindale cores just took a big step towards price equality with that of the older Nocona parts.
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ElFenix - Monday, September 5, 2005 - link
these PR numbers don't tell me anything =(andrewln - Tuesday, September 6, 2005 - link
mhz does not mean anything tooElFenix - Sunday, September 11, 2005 - link
mhz is very useful for comparing between the same families of processors.ideally they're be model/pr number, core mhz, bus mhz, and l2 cache size in these tables, i think.
joex444 - Tuesday, September 6, 2005 - link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Athlon_64..."> has a list of all the Athlon 64s, and below it has links to other types of CPUs where you can get a list like the one above from the link in See Also.For the "fun" of it, I decided to transform the list into a database. It's really interesting how many, for example, 3200+ CPUs there are, across sockets and cores. It's on my home PC, so I can't even find the best example for you, but I can see how you could be confused. I should do the same for Intel's, I think there's is more confusing. For example, a 520 and 518 differ in FSB speed -- the 520 has a 800MHz / 518 has 533MHz. It's a big difference but is only worth 2 points (assuming the 518 runs slower than the 520; if the 533MHz bus chip runs faster than a 520 but slower than 530 then it's a 522, if that exists, it's all theoretical since I'm not looking).
ceefka - Monday, September 5, 2005 - link
Would these boards require a 939 Opteron or do they also play with Venice, Toledo or Machester (X2)?ceefka - Monday, September 5, 2005 - link
It took me a while, but I have found the answer myself.From what I have seen from the Tyan Tomcat K8E S2865 it will play with 939 Opterons as well as any s939 CPU, though it doesn't feature the nF4 Pro.
Foxconn makes their NFPIK8AA-8EKRS for s940 CPUs NVIDIA nForce Pro 2200 + nForce Pro 2050 and nicy nice TI firewire controllers a+b. If they can swap the 2050 for a couple of PCI slots on a s939 version, that would be a nice board.
Tides - Sunday, September 4, 2005 - link
Is there really any gain from single cores atm? When will we see apps/games/programs take advantage of this.yacoub - Tuesday, September 6, 2005 - link
What you do is buy a socket-939 system now and a single core chip since they're pretty cheap these days. Then in maybe 6-12 months, pick up a dual-core chip when those prices have fallen a bunch so you're set for games that might finally arrivee that take advantage of the second core somehow.highlandsun - Sunday, September 4, 2005 - link
I just replaced the Winchester 3000+ in my system with an X2 3800+. My compile times have sped up drastically. On the 3000+ compiling my source tree took about 4 minutes. With the 3800+ and serial make, it's 3:22 and the system shows 50% idle time. With parallel make -j2 it takes 1:50 and the system shows about 15% idle time. With -j3 it takes 1:45 and about 1% idle time. I'm pleased.xsilver - Monday, September 5, 2005 - link
man those compile times are great but for noobs that are new to computers and only use it for surfing and games --- I think its still not really recommended that they get dual corea good analogy i can think of is turbocharging in cars -- too often i see people with twin turbocharger cars that dont even rev their engines beyond the 3000rpm limit for the turbo's to kick in. What a waste!!! and how stupid (eg. always driving around with turbo lag)