Will the Zen Based FM3 CPU work on AM2+ board? like AM3 did on AM2+?

[john5220]

What do you guys think and how does the future of AM2+ look?

I know for a fact that AM3 CPUs like the Athlon II X2 worked just fine on AM2+ mainboards.

One would assume the new Fm3 will also work like the previous generation?

Or is it a no go and its best to sell out a Fm2+ board with a 760K Athlon and go with a AM3+ and FX 6300 / 1150 with G3258?

If AMD don't won't it be a serious slap in the face to people who bought their Fm2+ platform?

 

[nismotigerwvu]

I would be fairly shocked if this was the case. The AM2+/AM3 transition itself was the exception, not the rule. Zen itself is a new design from the ground up and will likely come with a new chipset, as the AMD desktop chipsets are all getting quite long in the tooth. This is standard business practice and is nothing close to a slap in the face. Intel sockets tend to only hang around for a tick and a tock for a point of reference.

 

[Soulkeeper]

expect zen to be completely different and not backwards/forwards compatible with anything currently on the market.

 

[john5220]

I would be fairly shocked if this was the case. The AM2+/AM3 transition itself was the exception, not the rule. Zen itself is a new design from the ground up and will likely come with a new chipset, as the AMD desktop chipsets are all getting quite long in the tooth. This is standard business practice and is nothing close to a slap in the face. Intel sockets tend to only hang around for a tick and a tock for a point of reference.

Hmm well honestly speaking, with intel if you have a sandy bridge, ivy, haswell, broadwell, skylake. It don't matter because practically every intel runs anything and will run everything in the next 15 years to come.

Infact for the sandy bridge to not be able to run latest games etc it might even take 20 years at this pace.

AMD is different, practically every AMD CPU sucks and practically all of them are the same performance since 2007 infact Bulldozer was a step back the bulldozer bulldozed itself. One would think they might do something extra on Fm2+ like a 6 core CPU or something before they abandon it.

Would give those who decided to go APU a better chance to go dedicated GPU and 6 core CPU in order to keep the board, just my assumption.

 

[soccerballtux]

slap in the face? to the owners,, but offering FM3 to work in FM2 would be a slap in the face to the motherboard manufacturesr

 

[Arachnotronic]

No. FM3 brings an entirely new chipset, so I seriously doubt it.

 

[freeskier93]

Aren't all current AMD sockets dead? AM4 is replacing them as a single unified socket for all their CPUs.

 

[DrMrLordX]

There is no sign that Zen will work on any existing AMD socket. And yes, AM4 is supposed to replace FM2+ and AM3+.

 

[john5220]

ok well my friend has a 760K athlon. And he is getting the free windows 10 test preview copy thingy for those who like to pirate windows OS. M$ is giving away that free windows 10 to those kind of folks till October 1st.

So Should I recommend him to ditch his AMD 760K setup and get an intel with a cheap celeron for the time being?

I ordered that AMD chip for him it cost $75 USD. The celeron haswell is about $43 so i assume the celeron haswell will really suck in games like BF4 and upcoming battlefront which does not even seem to support dual core as minimum req?

 

[nenforcer]

ok well my friend has a 760K athlon. And he is getting the free windows 10 test preview copy thingy for those who like to pirate windows OS. M$ is giving away that free windows 10 to those kind of folks till October 1st.

So Should I recommend him to ditch his AMD 760K setup and get an intel with a cheap celeron for the time being?

I ordered that AMD chip for him it cost $75 USD. The celeron haswell is about $43 so i assume the celeron haswell will really suck in games like BF4 and upcoming battlefront which does not even seem to support dual core as minimum req?

You paid more for the Athlon than you did for the Celeron because its a quad core although each individual core is slower than the Celerons. However, your friend can play just about any current and future game whereas if he stuck with the Celeron that wouldn't necessarily be the case. You did the right thing as long as he is a gamer.

 

[john5220]

You know whats really shitty? the fact that AMD is too incompetent to even bring Carrizo Excavator Cores to the Desktop.

Seriously I feel for those gullible fools who bought into AMD lies about supporting FM2+ till 2016. It is actually shocking that they abandoned the idea of releasing excavator on the desktop one would assume it would only make sense to complete the full construction architecture from bulldozer to excavator.

Why leave desktop hanging? infact anandtech even had a picture of a Carrizo desktop chip he got at CES

 

[erunion]

Fretting about motherboard compatibility is so foreign to me at this point. As is the idea of wasting money on a budget CPU while you wait for a future chip. Those things belong to an outdated mindset.

I bought my 2500k when it launched and its still performing great today. It was slightly more expensive than I had originally planned to spend, but in hindsight it was an unrivaled value.

I dont worry about whether future chips will fit my board. This CPU+MB has given me years of good use, and when I decide to upgrade my CPU ill want a new MB to match.

The generational improvements are so small that buying a budget CPU to use for a short time is a false economy. If I had bought a cheaper SNB i3 while I waited for the 3770k to launch, it would have been an absurd waste of money and time. Better to just buy the best chip (for your needs) thats available when the need to upgrade arises.

Rather than buying a chip now and then Zen in late 2016, Your friend should buy a 4690k or wait the 1.5 months until Skylake launches. That offers a much better value, plus he'll have better than Zen performance a year earlier.

 

[john5220]

^ Do we have any kind of Idea how Zen will perform? since AMD claims they are going after performance this time? Can they be trusted to finally give intel a fight?

Or is this truly the end of AMD and the next time we see serious competition is when software devs start switching over to ARM? and ARM making its way to the desktop?

 

[DrMrLordX]

No, we don't really know how Zen will perform. We know what AMD claims (+40% of Excavator's IPC), but without a clockspeed reference or any reason to believe AMD, it's a bit hard to take it as gospel truth.

To AMD's credit, Excavator itself (in the form of Carrizo) seems to have lived up to the expectations AMD had for it, at least in the narrow range of clockspeeds available to Carrizo. Whether or not that has any bearing on Zen's performance remains to be seen.

 

[myocardia]

Your friend should buy a 4690k or wait the 1.5 months until Skylake launches.

His friend doesn't have the money to pay $99 for a non-stolen copy of Windows...

 

[erunion]

His friend doesn't have the money to pay $99 for a non-stolen copy of Windows...

Right, obviously not everyone needs or can afford a $200+ CPU. My suggestion was for someone who was interested in waiting for and buying Zen, which will likely be in around that same category.

My reading of the thread was that his friend was interested in upgrading to Zen when it launches, but I could have been mistaken.

 

[ShintaiDK]

You will be lucky if it even supports DDR3.

 

[nismotigerwvu]

You will be lucky if it even supports DDR3.

Yup! The move to DDR4 (and perhaps HBM on the APUs that will live in the unified socket) is going to be the big compatibility breaker. There just doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to throw transistors at maintaining DDR3 compatibility in the integrated memory controller.

 

[ShintaiDK]

AM2/3 is dead for sure. The 2 chip chipset is simply dead. The only question possible would be FM2+ compability.

 

[Dave2150]

What do you guys think and how does the future of AM2+ look?

I know for a fact that AM3 CPUs like the Athlon II X2 worked just fine on AM2+ mainboards.

One would assume the new Fm3 will also work like the previous generation?

Or is it a no go and its best to sell out a Fm2+ board with a 760K Athlon and go with a AM3+ and FX 6300 / 1150 with G3258?

If AMD don't won't it be a serious slap in the face to people who bought their Fm2+ platform?

If you need an upgrade, buy an Intel CPU and motherboard and enjoy.

Not worth waiting for Zen - it will most likely be another bulldozer.

 

[sm625]

By the time Zen launches, AM2+ will be 10 years old.

 

[john5220]

You know I find it strange that AMD will not release a 960K Athlon Carrizo.

Are we sure they won't do this? I think it was confirmed by anandtech? or is it a case that AMD don't want to excite the public and hence try to sell out as much 860K and 760K, seeing that Carrizo is so much better if people knew it was coming to desktop they would simply not buy the older models?

So AMD has plans on doing this but want to get rid of older CPUs first?

 

[Shehriazad]

It is EXTREMELY unlikely that FM3 will work on AM3(+).


It would even be unlikely to work on FM2....and here are some reasons why:

-FM3 will also be home to APUs. The power pin distribution/layout is very different due to the fact that a GPU also needs to be supplied with energy.

Thus AM3 falls flat.

-Zen CPUs are supposed to only have DDR4 support if I'm not mistaken. AMD is not gonna waste budget just to make it possible on older boards.

Thus FM2+ is also unlikely.

FM2+ is already not backwards compatible. FM2 CPU/APUs are only "forward" compatible.


AM3(+) is an outright antique chipset/socket. It's age is certainly showing.





Don't expect anything Zen related to work on anything but the new all-around socket.
Keep in mind that AMDs strategy is to fuse FM and AM together in this new FM3 socket...they want to unite all their platforms. I would not be surprised if AM1 style APUs also move on to FM3.

You know I find it strange that AMD will not release a 960K Athlon Carrizo.

Are we sure they won't do this? I think it was confirmed by anandtech? or is it a case that AMD don't want to excite the public and hence try to sell out as much 860K and 760K, seeing that Carrizo is so much better if people knew it was coming to desktop they would simply not buy the older models?

So AMD has plans on doing this but want to get rid of older CPUs first?

Carrizo CPUs would be a step backwards in performance. Carrizo is made with so called high density libraries. This allowed them to get a lot more transistors on the chip without shrinking down to smaller nm. Downside is that Carrizo can not clock as high as Kaveri...expect AMD to not bother. The only thing you can expect is a 870K. (The updated Godavari stepping of Kaveri)

 

[john5220]

ow ok thanks well that explains it.

I was off the impression that somehow Carrizo on desktop would yield more CPU performance. Well yeah seems Fm2+ really is dead.

 

[john5220]

So with that said Godavari is pretty much the last increase in performance for Desktop FM2+ I assume?