On our Gathering of Tweakers forum the first pictures of AMD's socket F have surfaced. We already wrote in may that AMD had put a new socket on its roadmap. The new socket would have 1207 pins and be aimed at multi-opteron servers. To prevent a cpu with support for DDR from being inserted in a DDR2 socket and vice versa required a new socket (I suppose that's not the only reason ;-) ). The extra pins that become available are supposed to be used for an integrated PCI Express controller. Notable is the space in the middle of the socket. This seems to indicate that each core of the dualcore Opteron has its own pins and will really function as a separate cpu.
The pictures show that Socket F, like Intels Socket 775, is equiped with pins that make contact with the cpu. The cpu won't be inserted into the socket anymore, it will be a so-called LGA-socket. Socket F is also called socket 1207 although in the same way that Socket 479 has only 478 pins, this model supposedly only has 1206 contact points as a precise count revealed. This socket supports registered DDR2 533, 667 and 800 memory so AMD goes head to head with Intels FB DIMM plans (?) as Intel will introduce its dual-core platform Dempsey in April which contains amongst other things the Greencreek chipset with support for FB DIMM memory.
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