New AMD Socket: AM1 (aka FS1b)

[Dirk Broer]

There's a new type of AMD socket on the horizon, but not for the traditional type APUs and CPUs.
We already had socket FS1, a CPU socket that is implemented in notebook platforms from AMD with its APU processors codenamed Llano, Trinity and Richland,
be it that the FS1 APUs only have 722 pins instead of 904/905 as compared to their full-blown desktop brothers.

And, just as socket FM2 was followed by socket FM2+, socket FS1 is followed by....socket FS1b, renamed as socket AM1

What's in it for you? Those of us with interest in the low-power socket FT1 (BGA-413) AMD Z (<5 Watt), C (9 Watt) or E-Series (18 Watt) can now look out to more powerfull solutions,
as the CPUs/APUs that are to be used are from the Kabini family -the same that goes into socket FT3 (BGA-769)- with the advantage that they are not soldered on the mobo.

Gigabyte has the first (commercially available) offerings, where the GA-AM1M-S2P is specially targeted at legacy -See the LPT1 port? I miss the floppy connector though- support :
and
but Asrock, Asus, Biostar, ECS and MSI are reported to have boards ready too.

The CPUs that I can find at CPU-World for this socket have a tdp of 25 Watt though (but quad core at that for both AMD Athlon 5150 and 5350 and Sempron 3850 and dual-core for the Sempron 2650)
so the 2GHz A6-5350 is expected to be as powerful as his FT3 brothers GX-420CA and A6-5200.

The prices for the new CPUs are expected to be around $50 and the same seems to hold true for the boards. This could mean a cheap crunching solution for our 24/7/365 multi-rig crunchers, aka farmers....
And it doesn't take much room either, boards are mini-ITx or micro-ATX.

Features for the new platform with their targeted CPUs:

• MMX instructions
• SSE / Streaming SIMD Extensions
• SSE2 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 2
• SSE3 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
• SSSE3 / Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
• SSE4a
• SSE4 / SSE4.1 + SSE4.2 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 4
• AES / Advanced Encryption Standard instructions
• AVX / Advanced Vector Extensions
• BMI1 / Bit Manipulation instructions 1
• F16C / 16-bit Floating-Point conversion instructions
• F16C / 16-bit Floating-Point conversion instructions
• AMD64 / AMD 64-bit technology
• VT / Virtualization technology

That's a lot of F16C / 16-bit Floating-Point conversion instructions....for such a tiny APU, pardon: SOC.



What does the present top-model have, feature-wise? In other words: what do we miss?

• MMX instructions
• SSE / Streaming SIMD Extensions
• SSE2 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 2
• SSE3 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
• SSSE3 / Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
• SSE4a
• SSE4 / SSE4.1 + SSE4.2 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 4
• AES / Advanced Encryption Standard instructions
• ABM / Advanced Bit Manipulation
• AVX / Advanced Vector Extensions
• BMI1 / Bit Manipulation instructions 1
• F16C / 16-bit Floating-Point conversion instructions
• FMA3 / 3-operand Fused Multiply-Add instructions
• FMA4 / 4-operand Fused Multiply-Add instructions
• TBM / Trailing Bit Manipulation instructions
• XOP / eXtended Operations instructions
• AMD64 / AMD 64-bit technology
• VT / Virtualization technology
• EVP / Enhanced Virus Protection
• Turbo Core 3.0 technology

Main competitor for this new AMD hardware platform is the Intel Bay Trail platform with as most powerful CPU at present seeming to be the 10 Watt 2.41 GHz Intel Pentium J2900

[Dirk Broer]

At present the AMD Athlon 5350 seems to be the most powerfull SOC (Not a normal APU, no: a System-On a-Chip) that can be mounted on an AM1 board.


But in the same family there's also the 8-core(!) AMD PlayStation 4 and XBox SOCs, beit on a BGA (Ball-Grid-Array, mostly a soldered solution)

The 1.6 GHz Playstation SOC has

• GPU Type: HD 8000 series
• Shader cores: 1152
• Base frequency (MHz): 800
• The number of memory controllers: 1
• Channel width (bits): 256
• Supported memory: GDDR5-5500
• Maximum memory bandwidth (GB/s): 176
• MMX instructions
• SSE / Streaming SIMD Extensions
• SSE2 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 2
• SSE3 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
• SSSE3 / Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
• SSE4a
• SSE4 / SSE4.1 + SSE4.2 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 4
• AES / Advanced Encryption Standard instructions
• AVX / Advanced Vector Extensions
• BMI1 / Bit Manipulation instructions 1
• F16C / 16-bit Floating-Point conversion instructions
• AMD64 / AMD 64-bit technology
• VT / Virtualization technology

While it's 1.75 GHz XBox brother has to do with

• GPU Type: HD 8000 series
• Shader cores: 768
• Base frequency (MHz): 853
• The number of memory controllers: 1
• Memory channels: 4
• Channel width (bits): 64
• Supported memory: DDR3-2133
• Maximum memory bandwidth (GB/s): 68
• MMX instructions
• SSE / Streaming SIMD Extensions
• SSE2 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 2
• SSE3 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
• SSSE3 / Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
• SSE4a
• SSE4 / SSE4.1 + SSE4.2 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 4
• AES / Advanced Encryption Standard instructions
• AVX / Advanced Vector Extensions
• BMI1 / Bit Manipulation instructions 1
• F16C / 16-bit Floating-Point conversion instructions
• AMD64 / AMD 64-bit technology
• VT / Virtualization technology

Both would be a much better solution for crunching 24/7/365 on an AM1 mobo than the 4-core Athlon 5350.
But you'd need a converter to mount these SOCs on a AM1 board, and where to get GDDR5-5500 RAM (Old video cards?) for the Playstation 4 SOC?

Had I already mentioned that you can give them (XBox, PS4) to the kids and let BOINC run while the kids are not gaming?

[Dirk Broer]

How to make the best use of the AM1 platform?

I assume that -as crunchers- our main objective is as much bang for a buck, without selling out to the power companies.

The AM1 platform has as advantage to the Intel Bay Trail platform that it is not limited to 8GB of RAM and that is next to it's much more powerful internal graphics.
In order for Bay Tail to be really productive you'd need at least the Kepler variant of the nVidia GT 630 to score at least some credits using low power consumption,
and that card is hampered by it's 64-bit memory bus.

It also adds some 25-50 Watt to the power consumption of a Bay Trail cruncher. All of a sudden the 25 Watt tdp of the -128 shader equipped- AM1 SOCs doesn't look that bad anymore compared to Bay Trail's 10 Watt with it's mere 4 EU Intel HD Graphics. Add that to the fact that you can buy two AMD SOCs for the price of one Bay Trail SOC...

So you need an AM1 motherboard (rumored to be dirt-cheap), some leftover 1600 MHz memory, an old SSD/HDD, an AM1 SOC of choice -hopefully we will have 18 and 9 Watt models soon too- plus Linux of your favorite distro and... away you go having optimum performance for less than the price of a Bay Trail motherboard!
(which seems to come including the J1800 Celeron for the models I discovered so far. The J2900 Pentium models will be even more expensive...)