Are you still interested in lower-performance but cheap hotrod boxes?
Look here, and here and you’ll see AMD’s roadmap for the first half of 2009 and some comments about it.
It shows Denebs popping up at the beginning of the year, but it also shows “Propus” and “Rana” cores popping up around March. Propus and Rana chips will be quad and tricore chips without the substantial L3 cache that their big brothers Deneb and Heka will have. This ought to make them pretty small compared to their big brothers (and Intel chips), and pretty cheap to both make and sell. Essentially, they’re multicore Semprons.
I’m sure they’ll be big in plain vanilla OEM boxes, and it’s very easy to see cheap boxes being put together with these chips and a lot of cheap DDR2 RAM. They won’t perform anything like Bloomfields, but the price will probably be only a fraction of Bloomfield systems, and rather cheaper than Penryn systems. The lack of L3 cache will hurt performance, but if the past indicates the future, the hit will probably be only 5-10%.
Then again, when the Semprons came out, we and a few others thought they’d spawn a generation of cheap hotrods like the long-gone but still remembered Celerons, but that never really happened.
I understand it’s tough to ask people whether or not they’d buy a system when they don’t know how well it will perform and how much it will cost, but assume for argument’s sake that it will do somewhat but not a lot better overclocked than current overclocked Phenom systems and cost a bit less. Would this be something that would seriously interest you, or would you stick with Intel until the AMD chips get more competitive, or go with the big brother AMD chips instead.
This isn’t a poll or anything, but I’d like to get a little feedback on this.
You know where to find me.
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