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First Round of AMD Athlon 64 Reviews In

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the comparing-notes dept.

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.

1 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Most Only 32 Bits... by Sangui5 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.