AMD's 890GX Chipset - Same Graphics, Better South Bridge
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 2, 2010 4:36 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Say Goodbye to ACC, Say Hello to ASUS
One thing AMD neglected to mention in its press presentation about the 8-series chipset was the fact that it removed support for Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC) from AMD’s BIOS. You may remember that ACC was the nifty tool that first let us overclock Phenom processors higher, but later allowed us to unlock disabled cores on Phenom II X2, X3 and Athlon II X3 processors. You heard it right, apparently ACC is gone.
Well, not exactly. Apparently ASUS has figured out a way to unlock cores despite not having easy access to whatever it is ACC did. And you have three ways to enable it:
1) Turn this switch on:
Technically it's the switch to the right of this one, but you get the point
2) Hold the “4” key during POST
3) Or enable it in the BIOS
Nifty. As far as I can tell, ASUS and ASRock are the only companies implementing ACC at this point. I suspect the rest will follow once they figure out how to do it.
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Taft12 - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Fully agreed here, the lack of chipset competition has led to stagnation on both the AMD and Intel sides of the fence.Especially Intel, Anand admitted in the H55 coverage that Intel did not reduce chipset pricing even though removal of the IGP reduced their costs significantly. This horseshit would not occur if Nvidia and others weren't being blocked from creating their own offerings.
Penti - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
They don't have licenses to produce chipsets any more. I fully disagree that it has led to stagnation though. Removing the memory controller on AMDs didn't lower the cost either. Both AMD and Intel finally has some enterprise (business) features such DASH and vpro too. Others simply couldn't keep up, nVidia killed ULI when they bought them, SiS and VIA has dropped out since a long time ago. Gaming components like nVidia 980a won't do a dent regardless of price.MadMan007 - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Hey Anand, thanks for including a modern low-end card for reference. I do have a request for what might be a useful article wrt IGPs for you. I'd like to know not how poor IGPs are compared to modern cards but rather to which *older* graphics card they are equivalent. Personally I haven't gotten many new games in a while and with Steam sales have been picking up some older ones too, there may be others in the same boat. Now when a game says it requires a much older card like a GF3 or Radeon 9000 or what have you I am pretty sure a modern IGP is better but once things start getting in to DX9 cards I'm not so sure. Would an IGP be equivalent to a 6600GT, or a Radeon 850?If you were to have someone do an article looking at this with older games that would be awesome and a great service to those who just play older games at this point. Finding IGP performance on older games is not easy.
nice123 - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Remember, GlobalFoundries is new. AMD are still using TSMC's 55nm process for this chipset. This is most probably because their 40nm process is absolutely crap. (as seen with the Radeon 5xxx yields and lack of Fermi)When AMD move to GlobalFoundries I think their hardware will pick up more, we won't have TSMC screwing up every single process they do.
Penti - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Still? What are you talking about, practically nobody uses the latest node for chipsets and many other none bleeding edge speed ASICs. At least they moved from 65nm. Intel chipsets are manufactured at 65nm.They won't move to GlobalFoundries for fabbing chipset/GPU logic till Liano APUs I guess they will design chipsets for GF then too.
Foxi - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
AMD should ban Anand from testing theirs stuffs. It's a shame and pathetic as well. :sstrikeback03 - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
lol, which part of this article offended you, fanboi?Penti - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
How about the IOMMU (AMD-Vi) support in the SB850 chipset? It's supported right? I want to know if the chipset and bios combo has it working.semo - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Wondering about that too. I've seen articles here test for virtualization performance but only in the server space. Would be good to see more info about these sort of things around herePenti - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Yeah it works for SR5650-70-90/SP5100 server chipset, but it's not identical even if it's the chip it's based of. So I was wondering if there's really support in the silicon and perhaps more important if it's supported in the BIOS. Otherwise it's not really interesting for me. I will still only consider the Opteron platform for an AMD machine then and it makes choosing a Intel machine so much easier. But I guess not since AMD don't mention it. Might not matter for desktops, but it do for workstations and Intel desktops supports it (IOMMU). AMD-V is of course there but that's a whole other matter.