AMD Athlon 64 & Athlon 64 FX - It's Judgment Day
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 23, 2003 1:25 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
Seemingly overnight AMD went from about to fall off of the performance charts to being competitive with Intel's latest and greatest. But there's much more to this situation than proclaiming a winner and leaving it at that; AMD has lost a considerable amount of credibility, and the Athlon 64 (and FX) of today will not bring AMD back to the heydays of the Athlon.
For starters, at a 192mm^2, the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX are well above AMD's "sweet spot" for manufacturing. When we last talked with AMD's Fred Weber, 100 - 120mm^2 die size is ideal for mass production given AMD's wafer size, yields and other manufacturing characteristics - and the Athlon 64 is close to twice that size. For the Athlon 64 to become the mainstream part that AMD wants it to be, they need to significantly reduce the die size - a shrink that the move to 90nm would be able to do just that. The mass market success of the Athlon 64 is directly dependent on AMD's ability to move to 90nm, until then the 64 will be exclusively a high-end part.
You can also understand AMD's desire to bring to market a 256KB L2 version of the Athlon 64, as reducing the cache size would not only cut down on the ~106M transistors but also significant die area.
AMD has also priced the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX very much like the Pentium 4s they compete with, which is a mistake for a company that has lost so much credibility. AMD needed to significantly undercut Intel (but not as much as they did with the Athlon XP) in order to offer users a compelling reason to switch from Intel. However, given the incredible costs of production (SOI wafers are more expensive as well) and AMD's financial status, AMD had very little option with the pricing of their new chips.
When it comes down to recommendations, the Athlon 64 offers very compelling performance at a much more reasonable price point than the Athlon 64 FX. We cannot recommend the FX until AMD does release a version with unbuffered memory support and we would strongly suggest waiting until the Socket-939 version is released if you are considering the FX.
What is promising however are the performance gains we saw when recompiling for 64-bit on the Athlon 64; if AMD can actually get 64-bit applications and a compatible OS from Microsoft out in the market then the recommendations become much more positive for AMD. Until then, it's wait and see, AMD has done well but execution isn't a singular task - it is continued execution that will guarantee AMD a spot at the top of the market again.
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AgaBooga - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Where is the P4EE in the memory tests?Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Personally this was rather anti-climatic for me. It's certainly not a Intel killer that all the hype proclaimed. AMD for business, Intel for content, and a throwup for gaming. Same as it has been for awhile.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#27 & #28 (amd fanboy double post)It SHOULD be up there with the P4EE because the PRESCOTT will be coming right around the corner! Face it, AMD did not put out a killer and Intel is sitting pretty in 2004.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#20 are you serious? Did you just comment in the forum without looking at the review or did you actually look at the review. AMD is not "lagging" behind Intel. They are right up there with them. Look at the benchmarks and you will see the CURRENTLY AVAILABLE Athlon64 easily matches a NOT CURRENTLY AVAILABLE P4EE.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#20 are you serious? Did you just comment in the forum without looking at the review or did you actually look at the review. AMD is not "lagging" behind Intel. They are right up there with them. Look at the benchmarks and you will see the CURRENTLY AVAILABLE Athlon64 easily matches a NOT CURRENTLY AVAILABLE P4EE.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
AMD, Pamela Anderson called. She want's to know how she can get a bust as big as yours. I have two words for AMD- "Segway" and "Scooter."Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
nForce3 performance bugTime to re-do the benchmarks, Anand.
Your FX-51 benchmarks are inaccurate.
http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030923/athlon_...
Nvidia: NForce-3 Bug
The extremely low AGP performance of the NForce3 can be clearly attributed to problems with the HyperTransport channel interface to the Northbridge. That is proven by the benchmark results and the performance differences of up to 33.2 percent. Details about this can be found in the benchmark section of this article.
Originally, Nvidia had planned to also integrate a SATA RAID controller in the Southbridge. Although the controller is included in the current NForce 3, Nvidia deactivated this feature. The reason was that error-free operation was not possible. For this reason, we decided to use additional boards based on the VIA K8T800 chipset.
Nvidia (Athlon 64 FX, or alternatively GeForce FX - related names) may be a more high-profile partner for AMD than VIA. However, we would point out that VIA, with the K8T800 chipset, currently offers a clearly better solution for the Athlon 64.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
What is that smell?AMD just let loose with a huge turd!
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#4 You may be right (I don't think so but let say you are), but then ask yourself - where is the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition? There is no mention of this CPU at Intel web site at all, there is no datasheet and no batch numbers. Today, it is only a prototype CPU, such as Prescott is. They managed to build few Gallatin B1 cores that are able to work at this frequency and then remarked them. This CPU is not reality, only OEMs can buy it in very limited quantities, but end users can't. I think a 3 GHz Athlon 64 FX on 90nm prototype would perform far the best in this review... and it would be the same policy as with this Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#17 Answers:1. Athlon 64's memory controller is very fast as you can see from the benchmarks. Dual channel is only needed in some situations to give decent performance. HT operates at 800 MHz with DDR and 16 bits, thus giving 3.2 GB/s each way (6.4 GB/s). Not so bad for a I/O and AGP interface only bus
3. S754 is a lower end platform while S940 is an Opteron platform. AMD will introduce S939 early next year and will continue to produce CPUs for all those sockets. S940 A64 FX will, however, disapper in the end of next year.
6. HyperTransport "Tunnel" system allows for practically unlimited number of chipset combinations, thus a PCI Express will only require to add another Tunnel or integrate it into current chipsets.