Dream a little dream of me.. (1090FX speculation and thoughts)

David Shaw


25 November 2013


Dream a little dream of me.. (1090FX speculation and thoughts)


(this is an article I wrote on OCN a while ago.. don't go there anymore but thought id share this with you guys too, with the announcement of the new AMD A10-7850K APU coming out in January I thought it pertinent... hope you like)


dava4444By: dava4444

Posted 7/17/13


Hi guys


been thinking about this off and on for around a year now. AMD 1090FX


AMD produced the 990FX two years ago now.. and at the time, their heads were up in the clouds with APU innovation, and quite rightly they should be proud! the AMD APU's today boast the best IGP's you can buy for cash money! they even let you crossfire these with low end cards, they have also released couple of chipsets for the FM socket. already you can see they have put a lot of work into this new innovation.. this is perhaps why.. as yet no 1090FX chipset.


The 990FX while good in it's day .. is getting on a bit.. I recently joked with a friend 'there is code in that chip, that even the Tardis can't translate' not true.. but I thought it funny at the time. The question for me was 'Do AMD expect me to give up and change to APUs, just to get a new chipset??' .. you might say 'oh the 990FX is fine!' and yes, you'd be right.. its fine.. okay.. acceptable. does the job. .. but if I could dream..


The 1090FX would have.. on chip drivers. An expanded UEFI flash chip much greater in size, which includes every driver for the whole motherboard.


And built in wifi.. why? surely no gamer ever uses wifi.. erm..correct.. I wouldn't trust it either... but when I do a fresh install it is so valuable and hassle free to have wifi handy for internet access, handy for a second network path (streaming from/to other comps) handy for sharing internet access to other computers.. not essential..but..


I would like to see more RAM slots on the motherboard, 4 is okay.. mediocre.. but 6 or 8 appeal to me, meaning I would not have to lose usable RAM modules to gain overall capacity, also if I choose I could put smaller capacity modules in and use the channels perhaps more effectively* ...


I would like to see DDR3.. but in the DDR4 range of speed, supported on the cpu memory controller and the next FX chipset/cpu range to have out of the box 3Ghz northbridge. at least. .. yes at least AMD! .. feeling totally narky about AMD's pants northbridges. I know the plan is system on chip, but cmon! if the northbridge is slow it chokes both the RAM and the PCIE bus.. flip! and we are meant to be happy with 2 something gigahertz and a tiny *token* heatsink? the Vishera is a fine chip but you put her in old clothes.. how are we meant to show her off when her dress is so tatty ..and all her friends (fans) know it! She should eat cake of a less 'Great Expectations' variety. or to put it another way, you can't kung fu kick Intel wearing clogs.


PCIE 3 with up to 6 lanes.. why? because we know this chipset is to last a couple of years and by then AMD and Nvidia might have opened up SLI/XCF to greater than 4 cards per respective multi protocol. I would like to see x16 only lanes.. why when the bandwidth effects so little? But when gaming in SuperHD you DO take an impact for x8 lanes.. this is only from my experience in SLI.. but check it out for yourself.


Unified northbridge southbridge and vrm/mosfet motherboard location with a big heatsink and fan slapped on. Something like Intel does now. Yes, this is copying them a bit.. quite a bit, but really they got this right! it was staring everyone in the face for years and they got there first.


I want to talk a little about AMD's plan for 'system on chip' ..To quote Futurama '..Welcome to the world of tomorrow!' .. why can't we have performance APUs beside the consumer ones? It makes total sense to me.. I really like Nvidia, they are familiar and very smooth. but if AMD started dropping the high end GPU's into a performance APU.. I think it would be, to pun, 'game over' for Nvidia. Crossfire IGP high performance.. ready to go! high end CPU and high end GPU combined with a high end card.. oh flip! .. but to regress, AMD don't have a chipset good enough to handle all of this.. being honest I don't know the FM chipsets first hand at all, but i don't think they are ready yet.. why? because if they were, AMD is smart enough to be doing this already. I had a look at the FM chipsets.. while they seem, efficient enough for now, in a year or two's time, I don't think this design is good enough to maintain the idea of a performance APU.


8 CPU cores, 2 GPU cores, Cache, Memory Controller, Northbridge, SouthBridge. I often think.. who cares how big the end chip is? the Vishera is sizable, but even if we had it twice the size, yes, that might sound stupid because of heat issues, but bear with me.. the performance we would get is unlike anything any other company could touch or think of touching. Heat issues would be very bad, yes, correct, but you're dealing with enthusiast chips here..


'go water, or go home'


I heard an acquaintance say on the subject of current AMD cpus. I think that is a witty and not altogether untrue quip.


System on chip solves the chipset problem, only copper and plastic remains.. I guess writing this I talked myself out of wanting the 1090FX chipset and my true desires came out.


Do I want AMD to 'win' flip no! I think a open market is a healthy market, but do I want them to do well.. yeah I kinda do..


peace


Dava


*but i am unsure of this as I have never had the opportunity to see many channels used effectively.