14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has to fight its battles on several battlegrounds in the computing market. But one arena that the manufacturer is used to is the CPU market, where the company falls behind rival Intel in the high-end processors segment. And with Intel's future to come Nehalem architecture, AMD will have a tough time with their upcoming Deneb and Deneb FX processor architectures.
Even so, AMD is reported to have managed to make its upcoming processor lineup more appealing to customers. The company's first 45nm native quadcores, codenamed Deneb and Deneb FX, will come with native support for the new AM3 socket. This might not impress you that much, if you have AM2+-ready mainboard, but don't go and draw any conclusions, just yet. Apparently the new AM3 socket will have an identical pin-out as socket AM2+.
The great thing is that when you plug a Deneb processor into an AM2+ socket, it will work as a DDR2-ready chip. Take the same processor and plug it into an AM3 socket and it will work as DDR3. This feature should make the transition all the more convenient for AMD users.
This solution also marks the first time in many years that Advanced Micro Devices decides to create an easy upgradeable CPU environment. As some of you remember, whenever AMD changed the memory support, users needed to change both their CPU and motherboard. But this time around, moving to DDR3 will only require a new motherboard as the same CPU will work in both AM2+ and AM3 mobos.
AMD's new CPUs will have to compete with Intel?s upcoming processor lineup, which has been rumored to bring an impressive amount of computing power, the likes of which we have never seen before. The Deneb and later Propus will have to be very attractive if AMD plans to keep up with Intel's future multi-core CPUs.