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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Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Anand runs the Content Creation benchmark without the bugfix patch?!?! WTF? Like that's fair... Without the patch, it doesn't use SSE properly with the Athlons...And the FX 51 benches are completely bogus, because he used an nForce3-based motherboard.
They've got issues, and the Via boards outperform
them significantly. Hello? Anand?
http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2003q3/athlon64...
"Notice here the contrast between the Athlon 64 FX with the K8T800 and with the nForce3 Pro. With the K8T800, the Athlon 64 FX is arguably the fastest system overall in the viewperf suite. The nForce3 Pro, however, seems to limit performance quite a bit."
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#9 Which planet are you on?Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Great news for the Linux users:-) I'm seeing a lot of Windows users switching to Linux and using transcode or cinelerra:-)Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Good thing you are not biased at atll, #4Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Eat it #6 amd fan boyAnonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
yes, you're right #4, they're biased. just like all the other tech sites praising the new amd chip. they're obviously all wrong.... go awayAnonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Still can't decide. Leaning Intel... I've had better experience with Intel.. but next year When XP64 shipes......Guess I will stick with my trusty 386..
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
BIASED BIASED BIASED BIASED BIASEDThe P4EE whoops new AMDs chip and you say is "The Pentium 4 EE manages to regain some lost ground for Intel, but not enough". YOU ARE CRAZY!!!!!! The Prescott will DEMOLISH AMD once and for all. Btw, get some more benchmarks. Q3 and UT2003 are OLD GAMES using DX8. Run Battlefield and other memory/cpu entensive games.
AMD fanboys can't cry about their chip is slower but cheaper either.
Worst biased site ever. Just because they kissed your butt and showed you the cpu's a year in advance you shove your nose up AMDs socket.
BIASED BIASED BIASED BIASED BIASED
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
What people tend to forget is that 3200+ is the INITIAL speed from the first batch of CPU's. As with the XP the speed will increase rather rapidly as well as die-quality and tweaks/performance fixes. Athlon XP debuted at what, 1500+ (?) and now ends at 3200+. The A64 going to 90nm will yield some neat increases in available speeds (4800+ anyone?) ;)Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
wtf no 640x480 game benchmarks?