Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3248

Socket-AM2 and Core Duo

by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 6, 2006 4:29 PM EST


The Socket-AM2 piece that Wes put up today was what I was hoping would go live a couple weeks back, but performance issues made that impossible. So what we're left with is a quick look at the new socket and some of the mechanical changes that you'll see with Socket-AM2 boards, but nothing on performance yet.

Why are there no performance numbers in that review? Unfortunately it seems that the CPU is quite early and the motherboards aren't ready for prime time yet, so performance of AM2 is significantly lower than Socket-939 today. I do expect that to change, hopefully by the end of this month, but that's why you won't be able to see any realistic previews of AM2 performance this early. It is a bit disappointing, since I expected the move to be fairly seamless and I honestly was hoping for production-level performance by now.

I've been itching to get my hands on Conroe as well but I've had no luck as of yet. I know at least Merom has been floating around out there but I've yet to hear of anyone (who's willing to tell me at least) that they've had some hands on time with Conroe outside of Intel. I'm hoping that'll change in another month or so.

The iMac Core Duo experience was interesting and somewhat anti-climactic. On the one hand, I understand that Apple is bringing the first Intel based Macs a little earlier than publicly expected, but on the other hand I was hoping for something a bit more pronounced. As I alluded to in the article, I'm expecting the truly revamped platforms later this year as you don't just cut power by 1/3 and not try and move to a smaller chassis. The MacBook Pro is tempting, but Merom isn't too far away now :)

I've been actively working on this USB 2.0 power draw issue with notebooks for a while now, it's not as clean cut as it's been presented thus far and I'm trying to gather the data to show the complete story now. The problem with testing battery life on notebooks is that it takes around 3 - 5 hours to completely discharge one and then another 2.5 hours to bring it back to 100% before I can run another test. It's a lot more difficult to test theories when you have to wait 7 hours before you can run comparison data to prove/disprove your point. I guess this is the only situation where I can really complain about notebook battery life getting too long :)

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