Socket AM2 let down by DDR2

DDR 2 MEMORY currently works at faster clocks than DDR1, but it still has some latency hang-ups.

800MHz DDR 2 may work at CL4 ms, but faster implementations of DDR1 can work at CL 2ms latencies, at 400MHz. This is a trade-off that you simply have to accept.

This lands AMD a problem. By moving to DDR 2 800 with an Athlon AM2 CPU, you won't see a pants-busting performance boost. Stuff will run faster, but up to roughly five percent faster not much more than that.

Funnily enough, the price of DDR 2 should be three to five percent higher than DDR 1 at launch time, so you can easily work out the price of performance.

But it won't be an easy task to convince the people that it is imperative to move from DDR 1 Athlons to DDR 2 ones.

And it looks like AMD will need all the sales patter it can muster as it looks like Intel's upcoming rival Conroe is performing as expected, or even better. µ