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
Business Application Performance
When we use the term "business applications" we normally think about computer users sitting in cubicles using their PCs as a part of their daily jobs - checking email, editing documents, flipping through presentations and such. It turns out that a good number of users outside the workplace use their PCs in a "business" oriented fashion, basically using their systems for email, web browsing and document editing.
The Business Winstone 2002 benchmark suite has been with us for quite some time and stresses multitasking environments that incorporate actions such as checking email, browsing the web, editing Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.
The nature of these tasks predominantly stresses the integer execution units of modern day microprocessors as well as their load/store units for memory accesses. Given that we're dealing with mostly integer code, a good deal of it happens to be filled with conditional branches (read: if action A then do action B). As we've seen in previous investigations, architectures with shorter pipelines tend to do much better with branch-happy code. So let's look at the results:
Here the performance advantage is clearly AMD; the shorter pipeline of the Athlon 64 combined with the large L2 cache and the on-die memory controller make the Athlon 64 a very strong performer under business applications.
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Anyone know how the new AMD CPU compares to the Apple G5? I am not an Mac-Apple guy, but my in-laws are, and I'd like to be in the know in case we get into a friendly "discussion" about the Windows and Mac platforms.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#58 Fanbois? lolAnonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
This review appears to be in the same general lines as the rest of the Opteron/Pentium comparisons; I'm pleased that AMD has managed to shore up their shortcomings, but the price point is what's keeping me away from going directly from a pre-XP AMD Athlon to Athlon64. If I spend $400+ on a processor, it better be the king of the hill for the next year at least, or at least the mobo should be upgradeable to compensate for CPU obsolesence.And I'm surprised no one's figured out how to unlock Opteron multipliers yet, since that's basically the heart of the early-day AXP overclocking scene... Bridge blowing, soldering, "wire mods", etc. Shame, shame on you overclocking enthusiasts for not throwing everything into unlocking the hottest new processor (figuratively, not literally; Prescott and P4EE take that award at 103W and 150W, respectively). :P Talk about good wholesome fun, take an Opteron at 3.4GHz (using multipliers) and slap that Zalman Cu-7000 thing on it; a Pen-what?
#58: No, there are dumber fanboys than Intel fanboys, trust me. Just visit Something Awful. :/
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
intel fanbois rank among the top percentile of dumbest fanboi's on the internet.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Is AMD actually planning on selling these versions of the 64? They and the hardware will be obsolete the day they are purchased. THe two biggest advantages the chip has can't even be used yet. The new mobos can't handle any more Ram than the current Pentium boards, I thought being able to use more ram was one of the selling points of the 64? Although that point seems to be moot anyway until a new 64 bit os is out.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#36 You're right dude. Intel indeed said that prescott 3.2 GHz can't touch the performance of the 3.2 GHz P4EE. Logical actually, since prescott has no extra L3 cache, and a longer pipeline. The only benefits are: larger L1 cache, larger L2 cache and SSE-3 (only needed for sysmark-2004 LOL!, and other intel benchmarketing partners)Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Anagram for Intel Fanboy - INANE BOTFLYAnonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
THG review: triple-guaranteed bullshit. Anandtech review: Infidel profane pagan loutish review. Ace's Hardware review: For great justice!11Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
original pentium 66 was pants got beat by a 486original pentium 4 was just as bad
give it 6 months for the chip to mature. hopefully the athlon64 is a success cause if amd go bust we all pay double for cpus
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
There's some confusion on using the term 32bit and x86 here. I believe what was mean in response to what #32 said, is that A64 runs x86 natively the same way a XP does with no emulation, (as was outlined in previous Anandtech articles) just by disabling half of the 64-bit registers. So it had better run at least as well as the Athlon XP/P4 or there is something seriously wrong... not something to brag about.#50, For an Intel fanboy you sure don't know your history. Using 386 would be more appropriate as that was the change from 16-bit to 32-bit... and things have not fundamentally changed in the instruction set since then.