After the phenomenal success of Athlon64, AMD’s upcoming socket AM2 based CPUs are certainly riding on high expectations. From what we know, these CPUs are supposed to be launched at Computex this year which leaves AMD about a month to go. These “new” CPUs are basically the same Athlon64 CPUs that we see and use everyday, except the memory controller has been upgraded by AMD to support DDR2 modules.

DDR2 modules are capable or reaching much higher speeds than your standard DDR which has an official top speed of 400MHz. At the moment, these AM2 CPUs support double that speed- or DDR2-800MHz. However, these high frequency modules tend to have higher latencies which hurts AMD CPUs more than Intel because of the integrated memory controller.

We managed to acquire a sample of the Athlon64 3500+ AM2 CPU and decided to quickly test a few of our standard applications. However, keep in mind that the numbers we’re posting are from a beta CPU using a beta motherboard with a beta BIOS. Lets look at the CPU-Z screenshot of the CPU.

The CPU is incorrectly reported as an X2 or dual core CPU. As you can see form the Task Manager, the CPU we received was a single core CPU clocked at 2.2GHz. We tested this 3500+ with two separate set of modules- a pair OCZ DDR2-667 as well as a pair of AData DDR2-800 modules. Here are CPU-Z screenshots of the different modules and their latencies- quite high as you can see.

For comparison, we chose a socket 939 Athlon64 3500+ CPU running on the DFI nF4 SLI motherboard and Corsair modules with a timing on 2-3-2-5. The following table shows the tests we ran and the numbers we got. With the exception of DVD Shrink, higher scores mean better performance.

These scores are definitely not something we hoped they'd be. Both DDR2-667 and DDR2-800 scores are lower than DDR400 in every test. However, we'd like to point out again that we're dealing with beta products here. Also keep in mind that the latencies on DDR2 modules will only become better with time which AMD CPUs will utilize nicely.