Reasons behind 754, 939 and 940 pins

[Theo343]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11789

 

By Arron Rouse: fredag 26 september 2003, 13:48

 

IT'S A PUZZLE that has been irritating many AMD-watchers for a good little while. Ever since the company announced that the Athlon 64 would come in three different pin counts, everyone has wanted to know why. It seemed to defy logic.

The Opteron uses 940 pins so it might have made some sense to stick with that. The socket allows for two banks of memory. A 754 pin socket makes reasonable sense too, it only allows a single bank of memory but there are some obvious advantages like lower cost. Why mess up the whole thing by introducing a socket with 939 pins?

 

At the technical symposium following the Athlon 64 launch, Mike Goddard, AMD Director of Technical Marketing of the firm's Computation Products Group, explained it in a way that it has left almost as many questions unanswered. But the long and the short of it is that Socket 940 requires a 6 to 9 layer motherboard and Socket 939 only requires a 4 layer design, making the motherboards much cheaper for chips using the latter.

Goddard is a seriously technical guy, he comes from a background of designing chips himself and knows a thing or two. He said that Socket 939 would allow later Athlon FX chips to use standard DDR memory rather than the current requirement for ECC registered DDR.

 

AMD has suddenly decided the reasons for Socket 939 are simple

 

Også litt mer om 940

 

AMD said that the extra pin is needed to work on six layer Opteron motherboards. As we said earlier, the chips will first start shipping in 940 Opteron configurations, and they will start to appear after the official launch date in September.

 

Our information is that will be in the first quarter of 2004. The 940s will, no doubt, cost a little bit more because of the price of the extra pin.

 

According to Rob, AMD said that the extra pin is required for simultaneous multiprocessing, because, apparently of SMP/hypertransport necessities.

Endret 16. april 2004 av Theo343

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