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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.
Give it a bit more time. The motherboards can still be tweaked to get more performance out of the system. I think we should wait a bit before really making decisions, and get in a whole load more real world testing too.
Benchmarks are not always entirely, although often can be, illuminating.
So of course I didn't read any of them. ... then there'd be something worth reading from a buyers perspective.
Gimme the results of Athlon 64 vs G5 vs Opteron vs Itanic
I am still blown away that the FX did better then then 3.2 P4.
Proper benchmarks include not using a 64bit beta stupid o/s like windows, a properly optimized linux (suse 64 or gentoo) and applications built for the chip. Openoffice, kde and kde apps, mozilla, some miscellaneous 3d engines running some impresive demos, maybe tenebrae quake. Tenebrae quake is great being that its open source and takes a huge amount of gfx and proc power.
I've been struggling to find any good 64 bit resources for Linux.
:-)
Basically, I want to know about all the 64 bit versions of major apps and systems, like MySQL, Perl, and so on. I know Perl is in 64 bit, because you can compile it to be, but what about stuff like MySQL, Apache, TomCat...
Post your best 'going up to 64 bits on Linux/FreeBSD/elcheapo UNIX' resources here, and attract some karma
Web Hosting Reviews
The test was the Athlon 64 running a 32 bit version they compiled of the MP3 encoder vs running a 64 bit version of the same program. The "bitness" was the ONLY thing that was changed.
Not really. While the "bitness" changes, what also changes is the number of registers visible to the compiler. The x86 ISA has been dealing with internal register rename as a nasty hack to deal with a sever shortage of programmer visible registers for a long time. This goes to show that the compiler is much smarter about register allocation than a hardware renamer can ever be. I'm interested in seeing the performance of common multimedia applications once hand-written core loops are available.And a note to those who are pointing to improved SSE2 support as the reason for the performance gain: they are comparing an AMD64 in 32 bit mode vs one in 64 bit mode. Unless GCC is being bass-ackwards, the SSE2 support should be benefiting the 32 bit mode as well. It appears that the only variables in this benchmark are the 64 bit math and the additional registers.
The Athlon 64 is revolutionary in that not only is it way ahead of its time, but it will also accelerate all other product industries such as motherboards, memory, data storage, software, etc. Yes, now, prices of components required in order to leap to this level of technology that will fully utilize its capabilities is expensive. Over time, prices will fall as those products will become the next standard.
AMD is able to release a cutting-edge processor while at the same time get away with telling the other markets to get-with-the-program because of the most ingenius aspect of the Athlon 64: it runs in both the 32-bit and 64-bit domains. Therefore, in the interim, we can upgrade simply to take advantage of faster bus speeds and multimedia instructions on an already proven chip, namely the Athlon. And down the line, with is closer than you think, there will be a chip and a company, with experience, welcoming us into a new era.
I don't really see the reason for moving to 64-bit just yet. I think waiting a little longer and moving straight to 128-bit is the best move for the PC world right now. Remember the 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit. It would be better to move straight ti 128-bit and keep that as long as 32-bit has been around the to have another few quick changes like what happened with 8-bit to 32-bit. If it's around longer it can become much more developed and standard.
Creative Demolition
Some apps require large blocks of contiguous memory - and with only 2GB of address space available, you can actually run into address space fragmentation problems long before you run out of physical memory. There simply isn't a large enough span of addresses available to map the memory into.
Other things compete for address space too. System DLLs map themselves into various places, leaving too-small gaps between them. Threads reserve 1 MB each, for the stack grow. Some PCI boards (e.g. HiDef video capture) map their buffer memory into your address space for easy access - which can be as large as 512MB!
Yes, more address space is needed even more than more physical memory.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?