moloko

Hey peeps!

I quite literally just got back to the hotel from AMD's Austin campus after a day with some rather interesting information being disclosed and freely discussed.

Unfortunately, the level of free discussion outside of the room is heavily covered by NDA so I'm unable to announce specific details. But this is what I can say...

The new platform from AMD will be called 'Dragon' and will be focused around the new 'Phenom II' processors, 4800-series Radeon graphics cards and 7-series chipset based motherboards.

Here are some general performance observations that I can disclose:

Phenom II and the Dragon platform can overclock to 4GHz on air - we were demonstrated a system @ 3.9GHz using stock bus frequency and HT link frequency and a multiplier set at 19.5x. This was done with 1.55v BIOS set. This system was looping endlessly through a Crysis time demo without issue; by the end of the day it was past 100 loops.

The platform core specifications demonstrated were as follows:

Phenom II processor
GIGABYTE GA-MA790GP-DS4H motherboard
Radeon HD4870X2 graphics
OCZ Reaper memory

While the unit demonstrated was @ 3.9GHz, we later had a hands on benching period with the new platform and I was able to quite easily reach this stated 4GHz frequency.

This same platform also exceeded 5GHz on liquid nitrogen cooling. But what was perhaps the coolest (no pun intended) specific of this demonstration was the processor operating and even cold booting at -196 degrees Celsius - that's right, AMD has no cold bugs of any kind, at all for Phenom II!

During this LN2 session the system was demonstrated operating in excess of 5GHz and running 1.95v BIOS set (1.936v CPU-Z read in Windows) and as stated, at the maximum lowest temps available with liquid nitrogen - time to find a liquid helium supplier peeps!

I'm gagged by the NDA on any further information and specifications such as model numbers, product features + specs, stock clock frequencies or even specific overclocked frequencies (i.e. LN2 max) as well as pricing, competitive performance or bench scores. So please, don't even bother asking me these questions as I cannot and will not answer these questions - at least until the NDA drops.

What I wanted to do with this post is at least let you all know that there is hope still for AMD and that while I've harped on about the LN2 experience, the overclocking ability is solid for LN2, phase, water and air cooling methods.

Cheers guys

youngpro

yay, ln2 benching back on phenom... i am looking forward to when deneb arrives on my doorstop now =)

eva2000

wow -196C and 5Ghz from AMD...

Interesting to see some numbers/screenies once NDA drops

T_M

Yeah, more important is whether its performance is worth the effort

dinos22

sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet

finally get to test my thermometers properly

good news from AMD camp

dinos22

josh
did you actually see -196C on the thermometer
you know that is physically impossible right unless they mean phenom2 no cold bug when system shut off

Deanzo

Wow, no cold issues at all.

Now that is cool!

dinos22

ok it seems that info posted in public so far is that these demo chips were really really nice cherries according to saaya which probably speaks from personal testing experience at Foxconn

saaya says average OCs on air are around 3.6GHz/1.4v and more vcore doesnt do much

massman claims that CPC is same as i7 but he's been told that i assume and i would take that info with a massive grain of salt