Thinking of the AMD Bulldozer Upgrade Path

It has been a while since I have updated one of my personal computers at home. I don't usually do a lot of heavy stuff anymore such as games, rendering, and compiling entire linux distributions. However I do a lot of virtualizations and I use processor intensive applications such as Inkscape for time to time. Anybody who uses inkscape or Virtualbox knows that running one or two instances of any of these applications will have a significant hit to one's computer resources. Even on 8GB of ram and at 3.1GHZ speeds, an old system will still feel like an old system. AMD's Bulldozer is just around the corner and they have released parts that will become what could be the first step of a bulldozer upgrade, namely the 900 serreies motherboards.

My home network is composed of 3 fairly new intel machines, and two AMD machines, one of which is a candidate for an upgrade. Owning both intels and AMDs made me partial and objective to my views on both processors. While I will have to admit that the intel chips are wonderful, AMD systems are easier and more cost effective to upgrade to the next generation.

In my intel upgrades, the story usually goes like this:

1. A new Intel chip comes into the market
2. Upgrade the chip
3. Upgrade the motherboard
4. Occassionally upgrade the ram
5. Wait for the new Intel chip to come to the market

The steps above basically means I upgrade everything when a new chip from Intel comes out. AMD has a simpler more cost effective upgrade path so far:

1. A new AMD chip comes into the market
2. Upgrade either just the motherbord or chip
3. Occassionally upgrade the ram
4. Wait for the new AMD chip to come to the market

You should notice that only one step is removed from the two, that step is usually half the cost of the entire upgrade, so in other words, upgrading from one generation to another is usually half the price in AMD compared to Intel as long as you have an AMD systemto upgrade from.

Luckily I do have an AMD system to upgrade from, and this particular system started out to be an AM2 system whith an AM2 chip, upgraded to an am2+ board a few years from that point and latter got upgraded to an am3 chip another couple of years latter. Now, I am looking to upgrade the board and the memory as well. I am going to skip the am3 route on this particular machine and get an am3+ motherboard which would still work with my am3 chip. Currently this particular system is the weakest of the bunch. It is only running on 3 cores compared to the others in the network which are running on 4 and 6 cores but the upgrade may potentially make this system the fastest with just one upgrade(CPU) down the line.

The board I am looking to get would be from asrock - the 970 Extreme 4. Whie this decision to go with asrock is not set to stone (gigabyte and asus are still in contention), what I like about asrock is that they always provide more features than the other guys at the same price point. For instance, this board supports 8x8 crossfire compared to the competition's lowly 1x16. While I do not plan to crossfire anything yet at the moment, its always a good option to have.

A few months from now, I could have this system upgraded to bulldozer and It will be my primary system to do virtualization with. As a web designer, one needs to have a lot of browsers tested and multiple operating systems too and to do that heavily on one machine requres a pretty powerfull system with a lot of memory and this upgrade may fit the bill. It would also replace my Phenom2 6 core as my Inkscape machine. Inkscpae loves a strong CPU, and with 8 cores comming soon, gradient rendering should much be faster.