by Anton Shilov
07/23/2004 | 07:29 AM
Shuttle Computer this week announced its new series of small form-factor PC barebones to support the recently announced AMD Athlon 64 chips for Socket 939 infrastructure. The introduction enables mini personal computers with extreme performance amid 64-bit capability provided by the latest breed of AMD64 central processing units.
<%BANNER[article]%>Shuttle’s XPC SN95G5 for AMD’s Athlon 64 chips in PGA939 packaging is based on NVIDIA’s nForce3 Ultra chipsets supporting 1000MHz HyperTransport bus along with APG 8x, PCI 32-bit/33MHz, Serial ATA-150 and Parallel ATA-133 with RAID capabilities in addition to a number of other I/O features.
AMD Athlon 64 processors with 939 pins integrate 512KB of L2, only a half of the size incorporated into the previous 754-pin chips, but take advantage of the very efficient dual-channel memory controller that is likely to decrease the impact of cut-down cache and even improve performance of 939-pin chips over 754-pin processors with 1MB on-die secondary-level cache, which is why CPUs in different types of packaging does not have similar model numbers at equal clock-speeds. The AMD Athlon 64 FX parts will continue to have 1MB of L2 after the transition to Socket 939.
Given relatively low TDP – about 89W – of AMD’s Athlon 64 processors, Shuttle did not have use install a power supply with higher performance or implement any additional fans, like on the latest line of XPC computers designed for Intel’s Pentium 4 processors in LGA packaging. As a result, the company’s SN95G5 barebone is still not only small, but also pretty quiet.
Shuttle did not elaborate on pricing and availability of the new product.