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
Intel's Preemptive Strike - Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
As we announced at last week's Intel Developer Forum, Intel preempted AMD's 64 launch with a release of their own - the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.
The Extreme Edition is a 169 million transistor Pentium 4, currently running at 3.20GHz (800MHz FSB) with Hyper-Threading support, and featuring a 2MB on-die L3 cache in addition to the standard 512KB on-die L2 cache.
The point of adding such a large L3 cache is to basically give the Pentium 4 as many of the benefits of an on-die memory controller, without actually integrating one. Intel is weary of the on-die memory controller approach, simply because of the horrible experience they had with attempting to push the market in the direction of RDRAM 4 years ago; thus a large L3 cache is the next best option.
A large L3 cache helps to hide the overall memory latency by keeping more frequently used data in the L3 cache, and Intel chose the size of the cache very wisely. For example, a single frame of DVD quality video can't fit into a 1MB cache but a 2MB cache is more than enough to store it. The vertex buffer data in most modern day games also happens to fit quite nicely in the 2MB that Intel chose for the Extreme Edition (EE).
Intel is toying with the idea of releasing an Extreme Edition version of every high-end Pentium 4 (e.g. Prescott 3.40GHz Extreme Edition), however nothing is set in stone yet. We have already passed along the information that an Extreme Edition processor would truly be worthy of the name if Intel would unlock the processors, allowing overclockers to freely push their processors. In order to combat remarking, we also passed along the suggestion that only lower multipliers be made available.
Both of these suggestions were provided by AnandTech readers and were very well received by Intel, it may take some time but we may be able to get the chip-giant to budge on this one.
The Pentium 4 3.2 EE will be available in the next month or two and will sell for around $740 in 1,000 unit quantities. The processor will work in all current motherboards, most of which will not require a BIOS update.
The Test
We used nForce3 boards from ASUS (Socket-940) and Shuttle (Socket-754) to keep our Athlon 64 vs. Athlon 64 FX numbers as comparable as possible. All systems were configured with 512MB of DDR400 SDRAM and used ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB cards with the latest Catalyst 3.7 drivers.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
122 Comments
View All Comments
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.