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Athlon 64 Debuts

Posted by michael on from the hotter-than-ever dept.

SpinnerBait writes "AMD launches their Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX chips today and there is a full analysis with benchmarks up at HotHardware. Interestingly enough, Intel pulled a fast one (literally) and released a new breed of Pentium 4 chips with 2MB of on board L3 cache, just in time to boost their performance in the benchmarks for this launch. Regardless, the performance levels for AMD's new flagship look very strong." Tom's has a story, or Tech Report, or see info straight from AMD.

7 of 481 comments (clear)

  1. Anandtech by Anonymous+Custard · · Score: 4, Informative

    And Anandtech has a good article up, as well.

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  2. Benchmarks by I_am_Rambi · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here are some more benchmarks

    AMDzone
    AnandTech
    XbitLabs
    Ace Hardware

    There are even more at AMDZones main page.

  3. A happy coincidence by RealAlaskan · · Score: 5, Informative
    By a happy coincidence, I just today got my copies of the x86-64 programmer's manuals. There are five volumes:
    1) Application Programming
    2) Ssytems Programming
    3) General Purpose and System Instructions
    4) 128-Bit Media Instructions
    5) 64-Bit Media and x87 Floating-Point Instructions

    Get them here.

    Then go make your favorite compiler or windowing system work better on this.

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  4. Re:What about supporting hardware? by tuffy · · Score: 4, Informative
    If you take a closer look at the pictures in the article, you will see that they've attached a wire to each and every pin of the processor. It's all a loose mess of wires and duct tape. If you want an Athlon 64, you'll probably have to do the same yourself, because there aren't scheduled any motherboards for it before sometime after christmas.

    This sure looks like a motherboard that supports the Athlon64, shipping same business day.

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  5. Reviews of Mobo and Chipsets by carbona · · Score: 5, Informative
    For those of you lucky enough to be already considering what mainboard your new Athlon 64 will be running on, OCWorkBench has been posting reviews in the past month on three motherboards/chipsets:
  6. Re:are all the reviews by idiots? by Zathrus · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't want to bother going over the implications here...those that know them, do...

    Fortunately, you're not one of those.

    64-bit computing is not a clear win in and of iteself. If you're merely doing 32-bit calculations then odds are a true 64-bit CPU will be slower, because to do the same work you have to move twice as much data to do it -- you have to fetch a 64-bit operation instead of a 32-bit one, and ditto for data. Presuming that the actual operation takes the exact same amount of time per bit then your 64-bit CPU would be half the speed of the 32-bit CPU because it has to do twice as much work for the exact same result.

    Of course, that's the simplistic case and ignores the actual case at hand. AMD's x86-64 is not a pure 64-bit CPU because it doesn't need to be. The x86 ISA is ungodly ugly (which is why nobody implements it anymore -- it may look like x86 ISA on the surface, but there isn't a modern CPU that actually implements the x86 ISA in the CPU core) and x86-64 operators are only ~10-15% longer than traditional x86 operators on average. So your operator length didn't double, and you don't need to double your instruction or combined cache just to maintain parity with old CPUs. Additionally, the current x86-64 spec only implements 48-bit addressing, which should be more than adequate for about a decade or so, so address fetches only increase in size by 50%, not 100%. Still an increase, but one that's fairly acceptable and it's a vast improvement for anytime you have to address anything >4GB in size (which is increasinly common, particularly for databases). On top of that, x86-64 adds 4 general purpose registers, which doubles or more the numper of GPRs available (the "or more" bit depends on the operation you're performing, since some of the GPR's in x86 aren't entirely GP). Yes, all modern systems have register renaming. Doesn't help much when you still only have a handful of registers available to a single process and it has to deal with only those -- the assembly code cannot know about the virtual registers, otherwise they wouldn't be virtual!

    As far as the data goes, you don't have to perform 64-bit operations on all the data, nor does all of the data have to be 64-bits wide. Clearly how much impact this has will vary from program to program, but unless you're doing a bunch of operations on long long's (64-bit integers) then you probably won't see much performance difference in raw computing speed. In fact, because of the slightly larger operator size and the increased address size you're more likely to see a performance decrease, albeit a slight one.

  7. Stupid comment by THG was Re:AT and THG compared ! by subsolar2 · · Score: 4, Informative
    On
    this page you will see the following stupid comment...

    Companies such as ID Software, who are responsible for titles like Quake3 and Unreal Tournament 2003, are not ready to jump onto the 64-bit bandwagon.

    Two dumb things about this...

    1. UT2003 is made by Epic

    2. UT2003 was a premier product that AMD was showing off as a 64bit application running under SUSE linux on the Opteron when it was released.


    Two big mistakes ... but I guess if it's not running on Microsoft(tm) Windows(tm) it does not exist, even if 64bit Windows(tm) is not available yet.