Why so many pins?!?!

Why does the Opteron and Athlon 64 FX need a ~940pin socket?!?!
Why does the Athlon 64 need a 756pin socket? I thought hypertransport was suppose to be more serialized? Am I to assume the memory controller needs that many pins?

http://www.socket940.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=126#126

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

No, processors are supposed to be parallel, not serial.

The more pins are just the nature of the increased power. Higher clock speeds, more transistors - you keep going up, the parts are likely to increase in physical size as well... and generate more heat.

The price you pay for more advanced technology.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Read up on hypertransport it suppose to be a serial bus:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_4699_2353,00.html
The Athlon 64 FX and Opteron have a built in 128bit memory controller thats got to take up a lot of pins but the Athlon 64 has 754 pins only 186 pins less because it has a 64bit memory controller?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I just opened that link and the word "serial" is not on that page

If the processor were serial, it would be hot swappable, meaning you could pull it out of its socket right now as you were browsing sciforums, and not have any electrical damage to it.... which would be impossible.

I seriously doubt any AMD processor has a built in RAM controller. Memory interfaces are found in the northbridge on motherboards, not on CPU's

Maybe what you read was that those 2 processors would support 128-bit RAM

 

Not the processor the bus the interfaces the processor with the motherboard. Hypertransport is not fully serial its just much more serialized then conventional data buses. Go to the link on that link: here read: http://www.hypertransport.org/faqs.html

Also amd Athlon 64 and opteron do have build in memory controler (intergrated):
http://partners.amd.com/athlon64fx/processorOverview/architecture/integratedDDR.jsp

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

I see, the second link was fairly interesting. Just shows off how AMD seriously focuses on new design features rather than clock speed boost

 

AMD believes in smaller pipeline over higher clock speeds. Intel believes in higher clocks speeds over everything probably because it knows that’s what most people only care about.