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
AMD's Gem: Athlon 64
When you have an architecture that has been talked about publicly for a couple of years and when all of your partners have had access to CPUs for almost as long, it becomes very tough to keep things a secret. Leaks occur and it would be an understatement to say that AMD was plagued by a few leaks, so most of the information you're about to hear has been published elsewhere and already alluded to.
With that said, AMD has brought two versions of their K8 architecture to the desktop market - branded the Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64 FX. The Athlon 64 is the 754-pin ClawHammer that we've been hearing about all this time, while the Athlon 64 FX is little more than a higher clocked 940-pin Opteron.
Let's start with the regular Athlon 64; contrary to surprisingly popular belief, the regular Athlon 64 does include an on-die memory controller - what it doesn't include is the on-die 128-bit memory controller found on the Opteron. Instead, you will find only a single-channel 64-bit memory controller with the Athlon 64. This on-die memory controller supports regular unbuffered DDR SDRAM at speeds of up to DDR400.
The other major difference between the Athlon 64 and the Opteron is that the Athlon 64 only has a single Hyper Transport link. Remember that the K8 architecture does not have any external "Front Side Bus" instead, serial Hyper Transport links connect the CPU to external chips such as a South Bridge, AGP controller or another CPU. With only one Hyper Transport link, there's no hope for the Athlon 64 to be used in multiprocessor environments as the sole Hyper Transport link would be tied up by the South Bridge/AGP controller. This lack of multiprocessor support is in direct contrast to the "lack" of multiprocessor support with the Athlon XP, which you could use in multiprocessor configurations; with the Athlon 64 it is physically impossible (unless you don't want any BIOS, hard drive or expansion slot support).
AMD originally announced that the Athlon 64 would have a 512KB L2 cache, however after continued delays and increased competition the Athlon 64 was given a full 1MB L2 cache. As we mentioned before, the 128KB L1 cache remains unchanged from the original Athlon XP and its exclusive nature means that the Athlon 64 has a total of 1088KB of cache for data storage (the remaining 64KB is for instruction storage).
The Athlon 64 will continue with AMD's model numbering system, although with a revised test suite. The end result is that AMD is much more conservative with their ratings, meaning that an Athlon 64 3200+ is inherently faster than an Athlon XP 3200+, despite carrying the same model number. As you've undoubtedly heard, the only Athlon 64 available at launch will be the 3200+, which will run at a 2.0GHz clock speed. The 2.0GHz clock speed is arrived at by taking the 200MHz Hyper Transport clock and multiplying it by a 10.0x clock multiplier. Currently there isn't a way to adjust the multiplier of Athlon 64 CPUs, so the potential for overclocking exists by increasing the Hyper Transport clock.
In Q4 AMD will launch the Athlon 64 3400+, which we'd assume would be clocked at 2.2GHz. The 3400+ will be the last Athlon 64 for 2003, and although we will see lower clocked versions in the mobile space, that will be it for desktops. The 3400+ will be introduced at around $600.
The Athlon 64 3200+ will sell for $417 in 1,000 unit quantities.
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Anonymous User - Thursday, September 25, 2003 - link
The Athlon64 FX doesn't have a multiplier lock either, but we never saw any results from that. Also I don't think a chip overclocking well means it's designed for "higher clock speeds".Anonymous User - Thursday, September 25, 2003 - link
toms just revised their review, "Update Sept 24,2003: Unfortunately we have made a mistake in the original article: In addition to the official P4 EE 3.2GHz we had included benchmark scores of the P4 Extreme 3.4GHz and 3.6GHz. These values were planned for a future THG article and were not intended to be included here. We would like to apologize especially to those readers who misinterpreted our charts. The two bars of the P4 Extreme 3.4GHz and 3.6GHz have now been removed. However, this issue does not affect our conclusion as we have only compared the official P4 3.2GHz EE to all other test candidates in our original article. For your information: The press sample of the P4 Extreme provided by Intel does not have a multiplier lock and is already designed for higher clock speeds. "Anonymous User - Thursday, September 25, 2003 - link
#81I also question why toms have a review to overclock P4 3.2 EE to 3.6 to win every performance chart. Is it fair to AMD? I like Intel CPU but I also like fair review.
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 25, 2003 - link
AMD needs to almost give this thing away so that it can sell well thus attracting a flood of 64 big developers. I think they should even do this to the detriment of their profit margins because if this doesnt sell well then all the software wont be developed. Its kinda like the chicken and the egg here and I think AMD should take a beating now in terms of $ to get this thing out and get 64 bit in the hands of the people. If everyone has it the software will follow.Anonymous User - Thursday, September 25, 2003 - link
Logic dictates that people whom use the term "fanboy" are mentally disturbed persons whom feel the need to categorize others into a certain group to make themselves feel better. On a side note though I think the Athlon64 3200+ is winner given its current availability, price, and performance. I’m just curious as to how far AMD hopes to scale the processor for the remainder of the year as though I already know there will be a 3400+ release in short time, I am wondering if there will be a 3600+ release in anticipation of Prescott. I’m also curious as to how quickly AMD will transition it to 90nm as I’m thinking one of the main reasons AMD hasn’t really made full effort in mass producing K8 processors are the manufacturing costs at 130nm. Either way it’s nice to see such a chip out, especially at the price it is being quoted for (though it seems some people are having fits that they can’t buy A64s for $100).Anonymous User - Thursday, September 25, 2003 - link
I think Intel is faring pretty well considering that AMD has reduced latency four fold with its integrated memory controller, incresed transistor performance by %30 with SOI, and doubled cache to 1MB. I think Intel will only close the gap with the upcomng Prescott but will pull ahead with LGA 775 Prescott and Grantsdale with PCI Express. Fanboys, save your speeches. Argue with logic.Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 24, 2003 - link
When is somebody going to come up with "folding" for people. We could use all the extra time people have on their hands debating what chip is better, to access their brain power to come up with cures for world hunger, A.I.D.S and introducing fanboys to fangirls. That being said, I appreciate all your opinions in helping me decide what chip to buy. Taking in to account the proccesing power I need for work and play, I have decided to buy an Xbox and a typewriter and forgo the 64 or P4EE.Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 24, 2003 - link
THIS FANBOY CRAP HAS TO STOP HOW NERDY CAN U BE??i am glad i am not so much into computers as most of u ;)...watch if one of these companies go out of business u see the survivor amd or intel making poor performing cpu's sold for $$$$ with a "take it of leave it" attitude...QUIT THE FANBOY CRAP truth is these companies don't give a shite about you only that little friend in your pocket that holds ur moneysprockkets - Wednesday, September 24, 2003 - link
The PM people believe that since they see the current situation in that Intel pays everyone not to use AMD, and that makes them a niche market. It's not due to AMD being slower or more error prone. Let's face it, Intel is bigger and has more to deal with, but as I've said before, they also can waste millions, perhaps a billion or so on Itanium and it's going nowhere. Perhaps it will now, but it's pretty stupid to see why. Sure it doesn't suffer from x86 legacy code. But look at what it took to get there, redoing software, apps, hardware, and a huge 400mm die. The Alpha people look to turn it into something, but that's alpha that made it something, otherwise it sucks.It's pretty stupid to argue here that the P4 3.2 ghz is faster or the emergency (good one :) ) edition is, the Xenon or even Itanium architecture with the cpus sharing a FSB and memory via a hub or northbridge architecture sucks compared to the hyper transport architecture the Opteron uses, and no amount of clock speed or memory speed is going to change that.
I wonder if Intel can now use it's own Itaniums instead of Alphas to run it's chip production line.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 24, 2003 - link
#91, That would be an expected outcome when half the tests are media/encoding benchmarks which are optimized for HT/SSE2. Not that there is anything wrong with that, just a simple note.