New Athlon 64 core revision -> even better Cool'n'Quiet

[jojo4u]

There is a new CG-stepping on the way. You can recognize them at the xxxAR, xxxAX or xxxAW ending of the ordering part number. The old revision had xxxAP.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content ... /30430.pdf

All have a higher Min P-State which is used by Cool'n'Quiet.
new: 1000Mhz 22W @ 1,1V 7A
old : 800Mhz 35W @1,3V 10,5A

This stepping also improves memory compatibility (3 DIMMS!) and performance and is offering a faster and more efficient Cool'n'Quiet. Older boards should be compatible with a BIOS update. What do we want more?

Ressource:
http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/sho ... did=144187

Hrere some interesting types and frequencies. The 0.13 is the manufacturing process.

Code: Select all

64 2,0		 0.13 TDP 89W Vcc 1,50V	StpGnt 32A max, CG 30A max
64 1,8		 0.13 TDP 66W Vcc 1,40V
64 2,0 mob	0.13 TDP 62W Vcc 1,40V	StpGnt 20A max
64 1,8 CG	 0.13 TDP 50W Vcc 1,30V	StpGnt 32A max (uc' 3400+)
64 1,8 mob	0.13 TDP 46W Vcc 1,30V
64 1,6 mob	0.13 TDP 34W Vcc 1,20V
64 0,8		 0.13 TDP 35W Vcc 1,30V	StpGnt 10A max
64 1,0 CG	 0.13 TDP 22W Vcc 1,10V	StpGnt 7A max
64 0,8 DTR	0.13 TDP 19W Vcc 1,10V	StpGnt 5A max
64 0,8 mob	0.13 TDP 13W Vcc 0,95V	StpGnt 3A max

[sneaker]

Alright, where is the jaw-drop emoticon? I guess this will have to do:

Just over a week ago I had an order for the current Athlon 64 3000+, but I decided to cancel it and wait a couple more months for better Cool & Quiet support from the mobo makers. I'm sure glad I did now, because I didn't think this big an improvement was in the pipeline.

Assuming there isn't some catch in these figures, I think this will turn out to be the biggest leap forward in desktop CPUs this year. If the current reports on Cool & Quiet are correct, most users will spend most of their time at the minimum P-state (1000MHz). You can run as cool as a 1.4GHz Pentium M when idle or using office programs, web browsers, music players, and so on. Yet all the power of a 3400+ is there when you need it for stuff like games and video encoding. Just a few months ago I think most of us would've doubted that either AMD or Intel would really get the ball rolling for speed throttling on their desktop CPUs anytime soon.

Combining improved C&Q with the fact that, under maximum load, the Athlon 64's power dissipation is lower than a similarly performing Northwood or Prescott, I think AMD will attract a lot of "switchers" among us until Intel sees the light.

P.S. Great find jojo, but how about deleting your duplicate thread before someone goes and replies to the other one, even if this deserves at least two posts?

[Jan Kivar]

Assuming there isn't some catch in these figures, I think this will turn out to be the biggest leap forward in desktop CPUs this year. If the current reports on Cool & Quiet are correct, most users will spend most of their time at the minimum P-state (1000MHz). You can run as cool as a 1.4GHz Pentium M when idle or using office programs, web browsers, music players, and so on. Yet all the power of a 3400+ is there when you need it for stuff like games and video encoding.

Yeah... Bring back the Turbo button!!

Jojo4u, You'd want to edit your post, as the old has 8000Mhz min speed...

Cheers,

Jan

[jojo4u]

Jojo4u, You'd want to edit your post, as the old has 8000Mhz min speed...

...done. Thank you.
My original post really annoyed me. I needed half an hour to make it. The code section had some tabs and they nastly did not align - it needed whitspace tuning

[CeeJay]

If you have 8rdavcore and a compatible motherboard you can do something similar , but the builtin support with theese CPU's is a really good thing

[riffola]

I have the older kind.

My AMD 64 3200+'s idle speed is 800Mhz and voltage is 1.2750V, this is with Cool & Quiet turned on, on the ASUS K8V Deluxe motherboard.

[DGK]

I have the same CPU, case and mb as riffola. I was surprised how well the cool & quiet thing works.

sneaker: I think most A64 boards support the cool&quiet but you may have to download a driver from the motherboard manufacterers website.

[sneaker]

It's something like 89W I believe... not as bad as an equivalent P4 but hardly cool and quiet.

I think the approach, if it works this way, would be to turn down Folding's CPU utilisation until you find the "sweet spot" where the Athlon 64 throttles down.

[xarope]

I have the older revision too, on a K8T, my 3200+ normal CPU temp is approx 50'C (Corecell)/45 (Aidee), when I had Cool&Quiet enabled it went down to 45'C/40 (corecell/aidee reporting). So far so good...

[sneaker]

At the moment only the socket-754 Athlon 64s have Cool & Quiet.

Re how its throttling works, the doc you want to look for is "AMD Athlon 64 Processor Power and Thermal Data Sheet" (unfortunately I don't have a direct link to it at AMD's site). The CPUs have a min, intermediate, and max P-state.

What the new revision does is increase the clock speed of the min P-state from 800MHz to 1000MHz, while reducing its voltage and therefore power consumption from the 32W of the existing revision to 22W.

[xarope]

ok this is something humourous for all to take note as well...
after having Cool&Quiet installed and working, I decided to startup Freedom Fighters (a game... cough cough... graphical intensive user immersive simulation... ahem).

lo and behold, I was running around twice as fast, and sadly the "enemy" were also running around twice as fast and shooting me dead twice as fast.

oops.

So I guess Cool&Quiet didn't ramp up till after the game had loaded, and the game must do some calculation as part of it's initial load to scale the game experience accordingly.

Solution: put the power options icon on my taskbar; click on it and change to Home Office/desktop before playing games, then click back to Minimal when not.

[lm]

That freedom fighters is coded very badly then. Probably most other games dont' suffer from this.

[DGK]

I am not much of a gamer but I do play some BF1942 and a few others. I also use a wide variety of applications on my computer and I have not yet had any problems with cool&quiet. The only way I know its working is with 3rd party apps that show the current cpu speed.

[Gooserider]

Used to be a problem back in the bad old days of the speed wars between the "true blue" IBM PC's and the "clones". (remember when DOS stood for an operating system?) The "turbo button" was so you could slow the PC back down to IBM speed for playing those badly written games. Alternatively there were 'slowdown' utilitys that you could run to make the PC run slower. (They basically just threw in lots of wait states) The fun thing about the better versions of those was that you could adjust just how much you slowed down, thus controlling how fast or slow a game would play...

Of course MucroShaft then got the idea, and invented special programs to permanently slow down computers, and we've been trying to get back up to speed ever since - something about Windows....

Gooserider

[tbadiuk]

I'm looking to buy a mobo and cpu right now. Are these new revised cores available? Which motherboard would be best to get? Is it worth trying to undervolt a A64 CPU or will that mess with cool & quiet?

Thanks,
Ted

[sneaker]

Since we're still starved for info, I thought I'd do some poking around re the new Athlon 64 revision and came across the following articles. They're not new nor even really interesting, they just haven't been mentioned here before.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/displa ... 84404.html
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13844
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14392

The articles basically ignore the improvements to the CPU throttling and instead focus on improvements to the memory controller. They also indicate late Q1 2004 production, and some Chinese site has supposedly already got their hands on one and benchmarked it, so we know they exist already. With any luck, they'll be hitting the stores by April

[PorBleemo]

If you have 8rdavcore and a compatible motherboard you can do something similar , but the builtin support with theese CPU's is a really good thing

The problem with this is they cause some boards to crash when performing this operation. As a result I can't do it on mine.

-Por

[SuperBusTerror]

Can anyone provide a reference to a supplier of this CPU here in the states? Also, can anyone recommend a reliable mobo for it?

My fanless Via C3 is reliable and quiet, but severely underpowered!

-- SBT

[rugger]

Xarope said

So I guess Cool&Quiet didn't ramp up till after the game had loaded, and the game must do some calculation as part of it's initial load to scale the game experience accordingly.

Solution: put the power options icon on my taskbar; click on it and change to Home Office/desktop before playing games, then click back to Minimal when not.

I have had this problem with SC Pandora Tomorrow as well as Thief-Deadly Shadows. Running AMD 64 3200+, plays Far Cry and UT 2k4 perfect, I'm assuming it is a problem with game coding. I did the installs with processor speed up (monitored with cpu-z and idle process in background holding speed) thinking initial calculations in the install caused this. Thief said CPU not supported with speed 800MHZ, until I installed like this. Didn't fix the problem though. Will post if solution works for these games.

Only recently started doign much gaming - is this something that the game manufacturer may put out as a patch to the games? FarCry and SC are both UbiSoft, didn't make sense for one to work and not the other.

[meglamaniac]

Can anyone provide a reference to a supplier of this CPU here in the states? Also, can anyone recommend a reliable mobo for it?

My fanless Via C3 is reliable and quiet, but severely underpowered!

-- SBT

Check the dates on the post above - this thread is olllllld
I would imagine all 64's are now using this revision (if not a newer one) and the information about C'n'Q only being available on Socket 754 is now rather outdated too - all 64's have C'n'Q now.
Basicly just buy one and it will have it.

FarCry and SC are both UbiSoft, didn't make sense for one to work and not the other.

UbiSoft are just a publisher, they don't do the coding - that's down to the developers.