Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/921



This article first appeared on the AnandTech Newsletter - Click Here to Sign Up.

Out of all the conferences and conventions we go to every year, the most exciting and entertaining is always Computex. We've been on the show floor for no more than an hour and we already have some very exciting news.

We'll spare you the usual information about the conference and will save that for our official show coverage for the main site. You're getting this information first through the Newsletter and as the show goes on we'll be providing first-looks on the Newsletter with coverage following on the main site later on. So if you want to stay on top of things you can head over to http://www.anandtech.com/newsletter.html to sign up.


A Hammer Balloon sits atop the NY-NY building across from Hall 1 in the Grand Hyatt.



It's all about Hammer

AMD kicked off day one of Computex with a lot of information about their Opteron and Hammer platforms.


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First on the agenda was a public demonstration of a 4-way Opteron system running 64-bit SUSE Linux serving web pages to Hammer based Athlon desktops.


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- Screenshot of the Opteron Server

There wasn't much to see other than the fact that the platform was running reliably in 64-bit mode under Linux. We're still waiting for confirmation of when to expect a 64-bit version of XP for the Hammer architecture; it would be quite a feat for Microsoft to have 64-bit Windows XP Professional available for the Hammer's launch later this year because of the fact that Microsoft will need to include 64-bit versions of all of the drivers with their OS. What may be even more likely is that we'll see a 64-bit version of Windows XP Server out for the Hammer with reduced driver support out of the box.

AMD's Socket 754 for ClawHammer

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Hammer: Industry-Wide Support

Although the 4-way Opteron demonstration was interesting, it was the public demonstration of Hammer platforms that truly got us excited. AMD had reference boards from all of the major chipset manufacturers, as usual we've provided eye-candy in alphabetical order of course:


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ALi is making their presence known early on with their Hammer solution. Composed of the M1687 AGP 8X controller and ALi's latest South Bridge, it will be interesting to see if this chipset marks ALi's re-entrance into the desktop chipset market after mostly unsuccessful attempts with the Athlon.


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AMD's 8000 series chipset isn't anything new but it will definitely be one of the first shipping platforms for the Hammer.




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NVIDIA is showing their support with a very early showing of their CK8 chipset which will be a NV17 based nForce solution for the Hammer.


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What's very interesting about NVIDIA's chipset is that there doesn't seem to be any on-board frame buffer for integrated video. The reason this is such an important feature that is missing is because we have been hearing all along from chipset manufacturers that the latency introduced by having to use the Hammer's on-die memory controller effectively kills integrated graphics performance. Remember that with previous chipset designs with a unified frame buffer the memory controller was physically right next to the graphics processor (or a part of it), but now the graphics must go all the way to the CPU in order to get access to the memory controller and perform any memory reads/writes. Unless the graphics cores are modified significantly with much deeper buffers to take into account this change in latency, the performance of conventional integrated graphics solutions on Hammer will suffer. NVIDIA's lack of any on-board frame buffer on their reference CK8 board indicates one of two things:

1) The graphics core of the CK8 will be specifically designed around the added-latency memory accesses through Hammer (e.g. through deeper buffers), or

2) The board on display didn't feature integrated graphics much like the nForce 415-D today.


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We got a chance to take a look at the SiS 755 both during AMD's press conference and on the show floor. Unlike NVIDIA's solution the 755 reference board did have an on-board frame buffer as you can see in the picture below.


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The chipset will be shipping with the new 963 South Bridge which has integrated USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394 (Firewire) support. The chipset will be in mass production by the 4th quarter of this year. According to SiS, they're not seeing a lot of demand for the product but they're definitely being asked a lot of questions by OEMs. It seems like everyone is waiting to see if AMD can pull off what will end up being their most important product launch in their long history of CPU releases.


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Of course no story covering AMD chipsets would be complete without VIA and thus we have VIA's Hammer chipset - the K8HTA.



Final Words

This onslaught of Hammer chipsets leaves us with a few important points:

- Pretty much every single chipset manufacturer is throwing their weight behind Hammer. The only one that's not is Intel and that's for obvious reasons. Compare this to the launch of the Athlon processor and you'll see that the AMD of today is much more confidence inspiring than the AMD of 1999.

- In spite of the public showing of many of these boards, most of them are not working samples. We know for a fact that the SiS 755 board was simply a mechanical sample and we'd assume the same for the ALi, NVIDIA and VIA boards.

- Because of Hammer's integrated memory controller these chipsets should all perform very similarly. The design Hypertransport connect between the AGP controller and the CPU will determine stability while the South Bridge will mostly determine features (e.g. integrated USB 2.0, Serial ATA, Firewire). Also the absence or presence of on-board frame buffer will have a huge impact on integrated graphics performance.

There's much more of the show to cover and much more to write about. We've already seen the first non-Intel RDRAM solution for the Pentium 4 and much more. Be sure to sign up to the AnandTech Newsletter if you haven't already to be the first to get access to this information.

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