This is a super quick note of a conversation I heard at a local Silicon Valley food spot this weekend. From what I overheard it appears that, at least for the 4P AMD Interlagos motherboards, some vendors will re-spin their PCBs to allow for better memory and HT 3 traces to the CPUs. Rumor has it that the higher memory frequencies on 32DIMMs in addition to 16 cores per socket (64 per board) was proving to be too stressful for some of the former 12-core/ 1333MHz DRAM designs in 24×7 operation.
I have no information on whether this is 99.9% of boards or 0.1% that are causing issues as this was a case of overhearing a conversation (so feel free to take this with a grain of salt since I do not normally publish this sort of rumor.) On the plus side, rumor also has it that the older boards will still work with a BIOS update and 1333MHz RAM and not every board will need this fix for 24×7 full load operation at the new frequencies. For those waiting with Magny Cours based quad-socket motherboards, Interlagos is coming and I have not talked to a single vendor that has said that they were not planning to offer a BIOS upgrade so it is an issue of getting 1600MHz RAM speeds more than anything else from what I gather.
As a note, if purchasing a new G34 quad socket system today, make sure you get a confirmation that the system you are purchasing is capable of running quad Interlagos 16-core CPUs and 1600MHz RAM when they are available. Major OEMs such as the HP’s, Dell’s and others have had Interlagos engineering samples for a long while now and should be able to confirm. This is something that I am guessing IT professionals are asking for anyway.
Now, of course, we just need some Interlagos CPUs to become widely available! AMD really needs to release these things ASAP to recapture market share before Intel’s Sandy Bridge-E hits the market.
I will try digging up more information on this if possible, but I would suspect AMD and its partners are going to refrain from comment since Interlagos has not been released yet.
