AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[Bonebreaker777]

AFAICT only the ASUS boards have overclocking capabilities, and I've not seen much info about undervolting. I know the Biostar ones have custom p-states that may allow some reduction of voltage.

But tbh, given how cheap the chips and motherboards are, if you want to mess with one why not go for it? For the cheap dual core Sempron, a mobo and a 1GB or 2GB stick of DDR3 it's pretty much in impulse buy territory (about £60 for the lot?) and you could just have some fun with it then sell it on as a bundle - I reckon on ebay you'd just about make your money back if you sold it all together as a working bundle....

Pff, I will try to dedicate £60 this month towards lottery Still it would be easier on my consciousness to have a buyer right away...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AM1 tested with a DC-DC PSU:

http://www.pcper.com/news/Editorial/...t-Power-Supply

AMD version of the Gigabyte Brix tested:

http://www.pcper.com/news/Editorial/...t-Power-Supply

[shaithis]

Nice numbers for the 60w laptop PSU....in hindsight, I wish I had gone that route.

[Bagnaj97]

That test with the DC-DC PSU is somewhat misleading though -

"The results are pretty interesting. At idle we see the 60 watt supply (sans spinning drive and BD-ROM) hitting 12 watts as measured from the wall. The 500 watt power supply and those extra pieces added another 11 watts of draw. At load we see a somewhat similar numbers, but not nearly as dramatic as at idle. The 60 watt system is drawing 29 watts while the 500 watt system is at 37 watts."

It's not really a direct comparison is it "Look, ye olde ATX PSU draws more power if you hang more components off it!"

[DanceswithUnix]

Pff, I will try to dedicate £60 this month towards lottery Still it would be easier on my consciousness to have a buyer right away...

The dual core part comes across as a bit of a dog in the range, might give you a bad taste for the platform.

Still, I see you can now get a motherboard for under £20, so a bit more on the CPU seems reasonable.

http://www.ebuyer.com/634886-biostar...herboard-am1ml

[scaryjim]

That test with the DC-DC PSU is somewhat misleading though ...

Only minimally though - swapping a Green HDD for an SSD and removing an optical drive is going to make, what, 1W DC draw difference at idle, maximum? Depending what load was used those components could well be at idle during the load test as well. Keeping everything the same would've been a better test, but it shouldn't make enough difference to invalidate the point (i.e. that using a low power DC supply is essential for getting the best efficiency from an AM1 system).

[scaryjim]

.... I see you can now get a motherboard for under £20 ....

Ooooh, that's the extended ITX board that fits in that In Win case with the 160W PSU.... damn that's tempting - I really wish I hadn't bought some FM1 parts for my server last year, that'd make a beautiful web and mail box....

EDIT: ah, I see they have the ASUS ITX board that supports overclocking as well. You could drop the quad core Sempron 3850 into that for ~ £51, so you'd need to add a DDR3 stick to the total cost, but that wouldn't be bad. A 133MHz base clock would give you > 1700MHz core speed.

[DanceswithUnix]

AM1 tested with a DC-DC PSU:

http://www.pcper.com/news/Editorial/...t-Power-Supply

AMD version of the Gigabyte Brix tested:

http://www.pcper.com/news/Editorial/...t-Power-Supply

secondLink = firstLink.dup()

Did you mean this review? Ars seem to like it, though not so much the louder gaming version: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/...for-its-money/

[AETAaAS]

Pleasantly surprised by the Tom's preview of the Mullins APU. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ssor,3813.html

The 4.5W A10 Micro-6700T stayed a lot closer to the 10W Celeron J1900 than I thought it would, even besting it at times. I really hope it makes its way to a fanless mobo config and the aforementioed Nano.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

secondLink = firstLink.dup()

Did you mean this review? Ars seem to like it, though not so much the louder gaming version: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/...for-its-money/

Oops!

Pleasantly surprised by the Tom's preview of the Mullins APU. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ssor,3813.html

The 4.5W A10 Micro-6700T stayed a lot closer to the 10W Celeron J1900 than I thought it would, even besting it at times. I really hope it makes its way to a fanless mobo config and the aforementioed Nano.

I started up a review thread just now for the new APUs.

Its quite interesting that despite Atom using a special low power version of the Intel 22NM process with Finfets,that AMD on a TSMC 28NM process which has been out for yonks can actually match or beat the latest 22NM Atom.

Edit!!

It seems they are now using GF:

http://translate.googleusercontent.c...8AsJ17QaqmBN3g

[Biscuit]

Its a shame that as with all AMD low power chips, they wont find there way into any desirable devices

Would make a great basis for a 9-11" Surface-esque tablet

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Its a shame that as with all AMD low power chips, they wont find there way into any desirable devices

Would make a great basis for a 9-11" Surface-esque tablet

Thank Intel contra-revenue for that. AMD does not have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to sell its chips at under cost price.

[Cyber-Mav]

AMD needs to pull out better performance chips, at this rate the next generation atom cpu will best amd's phenoms

[DanceswithUnix]

AMD needs to pull out better performance chips, at this rate the next generation atom cpu will best amd's phenoms

Only if they slap an Atom label onto an i7, though with the randomness of the Intel naming policy I wouldn't put that past them

Mind you I notice the server board I was playing around with recently allowed you to type in a TDP for the Xeon E3 1225 to run at so you could possibly set it to 10W and pretend.

[scaryjim]

But it'd still cost 10x as much...

The current generation Atom can't best AMDs lowest powered chips, and some of the single-thread comparisons I've seen suggest that Jaguar @ 2GHz has around the same per-thread performance as Athlon 64 @ 2GHz. So they're still a long way from besting even the slowest quad-core Phenom II (I should know, I've got one ). The original Phenom might be under threat, mind you, given how poorly the clocks on it scaled But I don't think we're going to have another Core 2 moment in the near future.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AMD 45th anniversary:

http://www.legitreviews.com/happy-45...fwlTEsvhVps.99