In the AMD’s terms a new type of socket for them, is a good indication that they are still in the market and competitor with the new Intel’s LGA1366 socket. The only certain difference with the AMD’s AM2 and 2+ sockets to their new so called AM3 socket is that in the previous two they only support the older DDR2 memory, because the inbuilt memory controller in their CPU can only handle a certain memory format which is a DDR2 memory. AMD did not have any time for also another built in DDR3 memory, for reasons that we could only think of, is to make the AM3 series far different in socket pins (940 for AM3 and 938 for AM2+) also the AM3 series socket can also support both DDR2 memory and the new DDR3 memory. Also when upgrading with different formats, you can still use the AM3 processors into an old AM2+ motherboards, backward compatibility is assured in older motherboards to newer processors. But when an AM2+ processor is around you or I cannot install it into an AM3 motherboard, for reasons like mechanical incompatibilities, with no support at all in both DDR2 and with the newer and far expensive alternative DDR3.
While I don’t still have the CPU and the motherboard that is AM3 supported, the only thing significant about the AM3 series socket is the support of the more expensive DDR3 memory, but still the performance would be about a fraction higher in both bandwidth and also latency far better than the DDR2 memory’s offering in 800MHz and 1066MHz. They still have the same branch data base with the Northbridge and the Southbridge controllers, still dual channel DDR3 and 2; with a maximum memory capacity of 16GB (or depending on the manufactured board you bought), plus the support of dual PCIex 16x in either NVIDIA or crossfire (an example 790FX for crossfire and NVIDIA SLI on an e790i).
For the mean time the newer phenom II processors will come in standard quad core and triple core architecture build and also the newer 45nm physical size to compete with the current core7i and the E8000 and Q9000 series from the Intel core 2; with a core clock speed of 2.5GHz to 3.0GHz respectively, with a memory cache of 1.5Mb to 8mb total; which will come out in late this month, not just in-time for Christmas but in early new year, and the motherboard AM3 platform will arrive into stores in January 2009. But I would not suspect that the AM3 series socket will be no great breakthrough for AMD, they should do more rather than introducing another product to confuse people and fix any impending problems it may have, we just have to wait and see.
