AMD Socket AM2 has a secret weapon

[Bio-Hazard]

It seems that all AM2 CPUs were outfitted with a support for Reverse-HyperThreading, an architectural change which enables software to think that it is working on a single-core alone. By combining two cores, the company has been able to produce the six IPC "core" that will go head to head against four IPC "core" from Conroe/Merom/WoodCrest combo. It seems that in certain cases, even an old AMD Athlon 64 3800+ can wipe the floor with Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU.

Maybe all is not lost for AMD............:wink:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32589

[Kougar]

It's interesting, but I think it's just a stopgap attempt... the whole idea with dual-cores is to spread the load around. If they attempt to use this for anything other than games, the loss of that "snappy" feel from having both cores devoted to a single application will be a problem. Even so, more and more games are becoming multithreaded, so the advantage will become moot in the not to distant future if they can pull this off.

More articles on this:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20060622143710.html (http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20060622143710.html)

http://www.overclockers.com/tips00983/ (http://www.overclockers.com/tips00983/)

[Bio-Hazard]

Sounds like a great way to improve performance to me seeing as there's not any real user programs out there to take advantage of a dual core anyway. So why not make them work as one for better performance in single core apps.......;)

[Kougar]

If AMD can pull it off, and can make almost full use of the second core then it may indeed make things interesting. But I multitask to heavily to ever want to go back to a single core, and HT only provides the illusion of a "smooth"/"snappy" feel I like even with the system loaded to bear.

If AMD makes this work and tries this with a quad-core chip, turning it into a super-dual core processor then I'd be very, very interested... ;)