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
#43 is a bit 486 DX style with 20 stages of pipeline up his crápperhole.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
ROFL@#36Dude the Athlon64 is a 32bit processor?....lol
Hey everyone...the p4 is a 16bit cpu with 32bit extensions.
Your an idiot #36. And this is coming from an Intel fanboy, so you really know your in the wrong.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Price is more important for AMD because they've had their successes mainly on the price/performance front. If they are truly trying to match Intel on price, that advantage is essentially gone and it'll be an even harder battle to gain marketshare.Oh and some of you fanboys mustve missed the PM forum. What the industry sees is completely different from what fanboys see.
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1873&am...
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Maybe if the intel & AMD both ran at the EXACT same clock it'd be fairer eh?I'd like to see more on the Opteron as I'm going to order 6 of them in November, thank the gods it's not my money.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
er... nm the above, I got it mixed up.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
FYI, in the LAME 3.93 MP3 encoding 32-bit vs 64-bit benchmark, you claim that 64-bit is 34% quicker when actually the graph shows it as 2/3.07*100 = 65% quicker.dvinnen - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Haha, this thread makes me laugh.1) The only thing Intel has that can toach FX-51 is the XeonMP, errrr, P4:EE. This processor doesn't start shipping for 2 to 3 months. I can understand including it in the review, but there should be some sort of disclaimer stating that this is a sample and may or not be reflective of the final product. The EE's also will only be released to the OEMs, so expect to have to pay VooDoo or AlienWare there outragous prices if you want one.
2) The Intel fanboys ADMITT defeat. They are already rationlizing it by saying wait for Prescott to come out. All prescott is is a p4 clocked to 3.4 ghz with "improved hyperthreading." "The 11 new intruction sets" won't make any difference for a year or so (kind of like 64 bit goodness that you are bashing). But I guess the added bonus that you can heat a small house with it is something that AMD can't provide.
And I wish people would stop complaing about the price. All new processors cost this much when they are first released. They'll come down, but not to the price of XPs for a while to come. The mobo costs will also drop drastcaly (past nForce2 prices?) over the comeing months beause of no north bridge and only a 6 layer PCB.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
64bit with 32bit compatibility would be what Itanium does. AMD64 is still native x86 with the ability to use 64-bit registers, thats why it can still run 32-bit programs as fast/faster than current CPUs.http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1815&a...
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#40 is a 64-bit moron.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#36The Prescott is the next generation in the pentium family. It's not like it's a P4 with an increased multiplyer. AMD is in trouble when the Prescott comes rolling around.