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.
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#10 Without XP64 only Linux apps can give great performance boost over 32 bits apps. Yes, I'm not a gamer, I don't care about UT2K3 or DX9 benchmarks.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#19i agree. good review, and how anyone could see an AMD bias in that article, i have no idea. he fvcking said repeatedly that AMD isn't really cutting it with the A64/FX. the worst type of fanboy is one that cant read.
its sad to see AMD lagging like this... if they fall too far behind, they wont be able to compete with Intel on a high-end level at all - which sucks for competition.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
That was a well written review.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#15, doesn't the fact that you can buy an FX51 along with an Athlon64 3200+ at a variety of stores now contradict that statement? I mean someone even said they sighted them in retail stores and the sort across the world before even launch.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
For the non-fanboys out there, I have a couple questions.1. Is dual-channel really necessary for the Athlon 64? What is the bandwidth of the Hypertransport bus?
2. Anand contends: "Ignoring the performance boost Intel gains by going to dual-channel, OEMs demanded a dual-channel solution from AMD simply as a checkbox feature." Do you buy this? I thought CPU manufacturers pushed the mobo guys around, not vice versa.
3. After launching on two different Sockets (754 & 940) - is AMD going to convert everything over to 939 in '04, or are we going to see high-end on 940 and low-end on 754?
4. Where are the UT2K3 64-bit version benches?
5. I know it's kind of hard to judge, but how is the driver support for 64-bit coming along? (As a measure, does anyone know if nvidia and/or ATI will be ready with 64-bit drivers by the new WinXP64 launch?)
6. This is more of a mobo/chipset questions, but where does PCI Express/3GIO fit into AMD's hypertransport plans?
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
What i really dont understand is this: "AMD has lost a considerable amount of credibility" and again : "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"What exactly do you mean by that Anand?
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#13The FX-51 will not be avaiable in any reasonable quanitities until next year. The availability of any succeeding products is pure speculation.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
I think we'll see the athlon 64 outpacing the p4's in divx encoding once we see a 64bit enabled codec.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
All reviews (with exception of Toms Hardware and x86secret, go figure) show the FX51 outpacing the P4 Emergency Edition in the gross majority of benches. That's not even counting the fact the P4EE isn't even going to be available until November (making this a paper launch) and by it's availability the FX53 and Athlon64 3400+ will have already been out in the market with us looking forward to the FX55 in late 2003 or early 2004.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#4 & #7. Please give me a couple of URLs (not thg) so i can validate your inspired response.