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First Round of AMD Athlon 64 Reviews In
wrinkledshirt writes "Here's a bunch of AMD Athlon 64 reviews, courtesy of 8Dimensional." AcesHardware and HardOCP match the Athlon 64 line against the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. amdmb, FiringSquad, and SharkyExtreme take a closer look at the FX-51. AthlonXP and PCStats have glowing reviews of the chips. Digit-Life compares the new Athlon 64 with Opteron and a Pentium 4. LegitReviews and Overclockers.com.au also both have succinct reviews of the FX-51. Overall the reviews speak very highly of the Athlon 64 and the FX version of the chip, with the only downside being the cost, especially of the FX chip.
The OS is 64 but most of the games/applications are 32 bits ?????
The socket format will be changing soon, and once the upcoming changes happen, things will be much better. You'll then be able to use non-ECC memory, and the motherboards will be less expensive.
Until then, yeah, the FX is freaking fast, but waaaaay overpriced, so don't bother.
A 64-bit address space is probably a good thing once a program is allocating 2GB or more of address space.
Follow this link ... 2.8Ghz Athlon FX for talk and benchmarks.
P4 Emergency Edition looks like from past centruy in light of this. Ok, probably one can overclock that chip too.
Are avalible from SuSE, Gentoo, and Debian!
SO if you are complaining "theres no 64 bit os yet", stop complaining, leave the evil empire behind and see the REAL power of opensource.
None of the above. It was Digital, with the Alpha AXP chips. It runs native 64bit Unix/VMS and 32bit Windows. Also x86 emulation via the !FX emulator.
Not quite.
The AMD64 core uses a 40-bit physical memory address space, which is 1 Terabyte. It also uses a 48-bit virtual memory address space, which is 256 Terabytes.
A full 64-bit physical memory address would allow for 16 Exabytes of memory.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
The multi-cpu support may or may not be still enabled, but the P4 EE has a different pin count than the XeonMP, so you wouldn't be able to use it in the XeonMP boards anyway.
I had to buy a new box as a pg database server recently..
:)
almost bought a dual opteron, but chickened out and went for a Xeon instead.
the suse distro that supports it is still a bit shaky and i wanted to wait for some good bench results.
maybe my next server will be 64bit..
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We've got a couple of Opterons at work, one for 32-bit compatibility testing, and another for the AMD64 port. It's pretty cool to see this in Python on SuSE Linux 8.2 beta:
SuSE Linux 9.0 for AMD64 is supposed to ship next month. Hopefully, it will be a little cheaper than RHEL 3.0 for AMD64, which will be more than twice the price of RHEL 2.1 for x86!We have a dual Opteron 1.8GH and a 2GH on order. We found that with RedHat and Oracle the Opteron in 32 bit mode beat the crap out of a quad Xeon for the stuff we do.
Just an F.Y.I. Again this was with 32 bit code. I tried the RedHat BETA and it wouldn't even boot up without locking.
So given that Oracle cost us over $20k a processor, we saved over 40 grand!
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
The results? The 64 bit version took nearly HALF THE TIME of the 32 bit version. This is the kind of thing we have to look forward to in some things (MP3s, video encoding, etc).
The Athlon 64 is fast in 32 bit mode, and can beat a P4 many times. But when the 64 bit code comes along, the P4 will be taking one hell of a beating.
PS: Sorry I don't remember which review had this test. I don't have time to go hunting for it right now.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Found it! It was Anandtech. Check out the bottom of the 32 bit vs 64 bit page of the review.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Hello!!!!! It is Oracle, a relational DATABASE, that the poster was talking about. I/O throughput counts unless you move some heavy computational analysis into the database. Very likely this isn't a "cpu" difference as much as "i/o" difference. Since the "i/o" (built-in memory controller) is bound to the physical CPU in the Opterons case it is difficult to pull those to apart.
Crunching through more threads isn't going to necessarily make an Oracle instance go faster if the blocks you need are "far away" from the CPU. Yes SMT helps to hide latency... but faster I/O helps hide latency too. :-) In the Opteron case in some circumstances it can do parallel I/O... each CPU with its own controller can pull in parallel. As long as the problems the are working on are segmented it is likely that they get twice
the bandwith any one of the those 4 Xeons will get. Under those circumstances the delta in GHz, unless quite large, isn't going make much of a difference.
Opterons are nice because they allow NUMA boxes to be constructed with almost commodity parts.
I don't have any firsthand experience with this stuff, but I have read a lot of the reviews and whatnot. I gather that the difference is in scaling to 2 way (and 4 way) boxes. While a single 3GHz Xeon and a single Opteron are pretty competitive, the Opterons are built for dual and quad processor work - especially with memory intensive applications.
Each Opteron has it's own memory channels in multiprocessor boxes. All memory is still shared throughout the system, it's just that there is more total memory bandwidth to go around as you add Opterons. In comparison, Xeon systems have the same amount of system wide memory bandwidth from 1 CPU all the way to 4 CPU's. The net result is that in many cases a second Opteron processor nets a gain 80% or more performance - which is a LOT better scaling than Xeons. This will probably be even more evident in future comparative reviews of quad CPU boxes since the Xeons will be sputtering on memory bandwidth fumes (relative to the Opterons).