I was going to post this in the Polaris and Pascal thread, but then it would have been Polaris Pascal and Zen and whilst it has a nice ring to it it's a bit much. http://www.overclock3d.net/articles/cpu_mainboard/asus_am4_crosshair_vi_impact_pictured/1 Ladies and gents, the first AM4 board and what a corker !
Holy AMD ITX Necro! Straight in at the sharp end, if true... There haven't been any AMD ITX boards with any grunt recently AFAIK Bring it on
There is no X99 Impact which I always found very odd because Asrock managed it... I dunno, maybe because the socket was so big on X99 they didn't do it for technical reasons. But yes, if this is legit then it could really light a big fire, one Intel will have awful trouble putting out. 8 cores and 16 threads on a board that could actually have enough fets to overclock. I'm not sure why that excites me in such a perverse way but it does
You & me both! Not had much experience of AMD, but I did really like my 785 / Phenom X2 BE rig that worked well as a medium level LAN rig for ages. I still have it here as it's got on board firewire, which I will need when I get round to archiving my mini DV tape collebction. Here's hoping that Zen will help AMD step out of the shadows. If there really is a ROG variant from the start, Asus must have some faith in the platform
Always been an AMD man, this looks like I need to pop some popcorn. Not that I can eat it, but it's fun to feed it to the dogs.
There have been rumours floating around for a while that Zen is going to perform on level with the Intel chips currently available, not quite up to -E levels, but close to, so it'll be very interesting to see how it turns out. I'm taking it with a pinch of salt, until I see independent benchmarks, though, I really want to believe that AMD have finally produced a chip worth something, but at the same time, I still posses their last attempt at something new, and it hasn't aged well. As a note, though, that image is allegedly faked, a supposed author is stating they made if for the sake of making WCCFtech look bad.
Except they won't look bad. They always post **** like this and it's being right some of the time that keeps the traffic coming back (and SEO). I read this this morning already too. It's WAAY too early for an Impact to be ready, usually it's the last designed because mITX is difficult. You'll likely only see a single ROG ATX and Strix/Pro Gaming. I doubt an Impact until the market heats up.
I was thinking it was highly suspicious that any company would even commit to trying to build an ITX AM4 part yet, considering they've not even released standard models, it'd be like pushing the boat out to see before even checking if it floats. All the same; I just want a Crosshair IV, a big beefy Zen chip, and an adaptor kit for my Archon, and I'll be set to drive another processor as far as it'll go. (Considering my Archon is rated at silly high TDPs; I should see some nice performance without it getting too toasty, assuming it doesn't share the issues I was having with my FX.)
If history repeats itself, I'll give you an idea of what AMD's launches are like: > It's likely that AMD won't even have a reference platform finalized yet - which is always ATX. > When Bulldozer launched way back when it wasn't even stable AT STOCK SPEEDS ON ITS ORIGINAL LAUNCH DAY. This made all its partners **** themselves over the risk. It was pushed back a few times. > AMD documentation and engineering assistance is always very sparce, which increases the risk MB companies will face. Coupled with years of very low interest in AMD in the channel (sales decide new model commitment) and I guess near-zero marketing fund (what AMD will commit to in a year Intel will offer for 1 product for 1 month), no one will attempt a large investment on this platform = a couple of low-medium range ATX boards. I would imagine you'll be looking at 2nd gen boards to get the best OC experience as the 1st gen will be a learning experience. I suspect a Crosshair VI Hero(?) might be late as well just to give it more tweaking time. There will be a Strix/-A/-K first. No more Deluxe's.
That's one pessimistic out look for a chip. If it plays as you said AMD are already destined to fail.
Not destined to fail but they are not going to go from sub10% to 30+% in a quarter. The channel is always behind consumer tastes as it relies on sales data. It pivots a lot on performance and consumer push - if there's significant demand (actual money being spent not forum froth sorry) the reaction will be quite swift to fill the gap because MB makers are hungry for more sales. Once it gets rolling and the landscape is known they will gain confidence, but AMD's initial delivery is never on time or backed well. Bulldozer was sour from pre-beginning until end, so I hope things are improving behind the scenes. I'll make a note to ask but I still think it's too early.
Yeah Bulldozer had issues. The main one for me was that they kept it on the same socket which meant that there were already tons of boards out there that simply couldn't power the chip properly. That confusion continued all the way to the end too, with board makers even making 990FX boards for people to run Phenom 2 CPUs in with four phases that just collapsed under any sort of load with an 8 C FX. In some cases MSI boards actually caught fire because the fets had zero cooling ffs. They just weren't expecting Bulldozer to pull so much current. Ah well. Hopefully this will be a ground up thing and there will be no confusion.
"Bulldozer had Issues" is an understatement along the lines of "Things haven't gone well", the chip is a trainwreck that should really have never seen the light of day, but AMD had dumped too much time and money into developing it to be able to drop it, so they had to roll with what they had. Off the top of my head; High latencies on internal caches, higher than Phenom II, Memory Controller that was essentially just a mildly upgraded Athlon 64 part, Decode unit bottlenecks, lower single-thread IPC than Phenom II parts, HT Link not actually clocked at the rated speed. That's just what I can remember, HTLink is a big one, even the Crosshair V won't set that to 2.6ghz out of the box, which is AMD's rated for required speed, because that clock is also the IMC clock, and that really does not like being driven that far. Just a question Bindi; say Zen is Benchmarked early, a fair chunk before release, and performs exceptionally well for it's price bracket; would that convince Motherboard Manufacturers to churn out a couple of higher end boards close to release? Or would it require raw absolute sales data before they'd commit to something like that?
It would require raw sales data. Positive press has got to turn into sales, which doesn't always happen, and a lot of buyer are sold at the store-front and buy on brands they know. It's why there's a big pivot to gaming: those people don't read tech forums and rarely any review but it's a much bigger audience. It's a moot argument anyhoo because drivers won't be ready until much closer to release.
