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.

Comments

Hmm..

[darkov]

Is it possible to have a first round of reviews after an earlier story about Athlon 64 reviews?

fp

Re:Hmm..

[bj8rn]

Yes it is:

1) The earlier story was round 0, or
2) the earlier story was the pre-match bragging part, or
3) some other reason (not profit, though)

64bit.. Schmobit...

[deunan_k]

Enough! Leave me alone with my abacus...

Um, anyone knows how many bits can an abacus counts to?

Hang on..

[madprof]

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.

Re:Hang on..

[captainclever]

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.. :)

Re:Hang on..

[FatherOfONe]

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!

Re:Hang on..

[SD-VI]

Actually, I doubt the motherboards can be tweaked all that much. You see, usually any performance increase from motherboard tweaking comes from memory controller optimization, and the ClawHammer (Athlon 64) and SledgeHammer (Athlon 64 FX / Opteron) have an on-die memory controller. I'd look more to code optimization than motherboard revisions if I were you. This also means that the performance difference between chipsets is tiny. nForce3 will probably be very popular just because of nForce2, even though it was nForce2's robust memory controller that gave it its superb reputation). Even the ALi (shudder) chipsets will do fine.

Re:Hang on..

[WoTG]

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).

Re:Hang on..

[Jeff DeMaagd]

You know, I can't disagree. Moving the memory controller must have greatly simplified the chipset design. Even the multiprocessing is greatly simplified as well as the CPUs are the ones that handle that, one may be able to use the exact same chipset for both dual and single chip board designs, possibly even quad designs. The down side is that a lot of dual CPU and definitely all new quad CPU systems need greater I/O, that which the single CPU designs rarely need, such as 64 bit PCI slots, at 66, 100 and 133 MHz speeds.

do they use any 64 bit applications ??

[zymano]

The OS is 64 but most of the games/applications are 32 bits ?????

don't bother with the FX yet

[Tumbleweed]

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.

Re:don't bother with the FX yet

[Tumbleweed]

I think that the new Socket 939 format will be available 6 months or so before PCI Express x16 becomes mainstream. I've been reading that the switch to PCI Express won't be happening, for the most part, until the 2nd half of next year, whereas Socket 939 should be at the beginning of 2Q next year. Of course, that assumes that everything happens on schedule, which never happens. :)

It's all a moot point for me - my next computer will be a Mac G5. Because of the coming PCI Express train, I'm not going for the big duallie for now - I'm gonna get the single proc 1.8GHz machine, then upgrade to the then-biggie once they migrate to PCI Express.

Re:Memory mapped disk?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have lot of RAM or so programs will tend to exhaust the 32-bit address space before actually consuming all the physical memory. One example is that creating a thread might represent the reservation of 64KB of address space for its stack, while only 8KB of physical memory is actually committed.

A 64-bit address space is probably a good thing once a program is allocating 2GB or more of address space.

Betas Of Athlon64 Optimized Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Betas Of Athlon64 Optimized Linux

[Brian Stretch]

And Mandrake and Red Hat Enterprise (somewhere).

64-bit Windows beta is available via MSDN if you need Evil Empire compatability.

There's even a bootable CD of 64-bit America's Army. Linux based, of course.

Re:you can get more ...

[The One KEA]

Damn! You stole my thunder; I was going to post this benchmark.

I think the biggest con of the FX51 is that soon it will be orphaned because of the 940pin -> 939pin change, which will allow that particular core to use normal DDR400 memory instead of registered ECC DDR400 memory.

Re:Finally!

[yoshac]

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.

Re:Pentium 4 Emergency Edition

[MarcoAtWork]

while it's very likely that this is the case for the reviewing samples (probably rushed out as fast as possible, I can't believe that Intel had plans for the EE all along given that there were 0 leaks) given that this is a paper launch by the time the EE will actually be available to customers I'm sure the MP support will disappear.

Re:Quote from the article

[The One KEA]

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.

Re:Pentium 4 Emergency Edition

[Unoriginal Nick]

It was either the Inquirer or The Register that had an interesting article saying that these CPUs (which are MP Xeons) still have their multi-cpu support enabled, thus saving astute customers thousands of dollars over their full-priced, $3,900 Xeon counterparts.

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.

Re:64bit.. Schmobit...

[notanatheist]

this is not a problem with an abacus as you can own an original 8 bit abacus and just add 8, 16, 32, or even 64bit upgrade kits. You may need a larger frame to accomadate the beads but you'll have years of growth from your very own abacus.

more motherboard reviews, please (esp. w/ Linux)

[_|()|\|]

I haven't made all the rounds, but it seems like everyone is using the same two motherboards: Asus SK8N and MSI 8KT. I really like the looks of Monarch's Hornet 64, with a uATX Gigabyte GA-K8VT800M. I'd like to see some reviews first, especially regarding chipset support under Linux. I'd also like to hear more about video drivers. I've heard that NVIDIA's drivers need some work. (Does ATI even have any?)

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:

>>> type( 9223372036854775807 )
<type 'int'>

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!

Proper benchmarks

[NitroPye]

Untill I see proper benchmarks done with applications built for 64bit chips I am going to go pffffft.

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.

Re:Wooah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction =! != !=

Most Only 32 Bits...

[MBCook]

The reviews are basically all 32 bit, which is a shame. Linux is out there. I've only seen one review that did anything really 64 bit (running win32 programs on win64 doesn't count). The only 64 bit test they did under Linux was MP3 encoding. 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.

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.

Re:Most Only 32 Bits...

[Sangui5]

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.

64 bit resources

[JusTyler]

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 :-)

Re:Most Only 32 Bits... FOUND IT

[MBCook]

Found it! It was Anandtech. Check out the bottom of the 32 bit vs 64 bit page of the review.

Re:"organic" ICs

[cosmo7]

Organic integrated circuits are produced without using fertilizer or pesticide.

Re:Memory mapped disk?

[ianezz]

You will not see consumer systems with more then 4GB any time soon

The point about mmap(2) is to let the system (the VM subsystem of the kernel) manage the caching for the userland processes using it, avoiding extra copies to/from buffers in userland and eliminating in several cases the need for custom caching code (processes don't have to worry about data being available in RAM: the kernel automatically takes care of that when needed).

You don't need gobs of memory to do this, but in order to work on large amount of data you need a large address space, which is what 64 bit architectures provide. Of course, the more physical memory you have, the less the kernel has to swap pages in and out, but the main point is not that.

A little example to clarify: in order to keep things simple (instead of needing two intermixed caching systems, one for the VM and one for disk accesses), the Hurd just mmaps the whole partition. This means that the maximum size of a partition has an upper limit given by the size of the addressing space, which is 4GB on 32bit architectures (actually less, since in that address space you have to keep also the code that uses the mmapped data, so it's more like 2GB/3GB). A 64bit architecture comes very handy here, given the current size of hard disks.

Re:Pentium 4 Emergency Edition

[BlueBiker]

Makes ya wonder whether a company such as Powerleap might come out with a CPU adapter to support it. For a long time the Athlon MP series offered the only affordable SMP solution, especially if like me you found a pair of Athlon XPs which worked happily in SMP mode.

Athlon FX 2.8 Ghz today!

[sundling]

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000253
has a cooling technology that allowed them to overclock to a 2.8 Ghz Athlon FX. It was pretty impressive stuff, especially how well Age of Mythology did, even against the non-shipping P4 Emergency Edition.

I can't wait until theres 64 bit games for this sort of thing. Of course, the first to be released will be Unreal Tournament. Oh yahh!! I know I'll own at least one of the AMD64 computers within the next year!

I'd love to have a new AMD64 for my application server. There were benchmarks on extreme tech showing a 1.6 Ghz dual opteron beating a 2.8 Ghz quad xeon by gigantic margins (almost double). So when these Athlon 64 processors trickle down to the same clocked Opterons, it should start to shake up the server market even more. Especially given upcoming backing from Sun:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11772

Ugh...

[wicka_wicka]

Doesn't anyone realize that the Athlon 64 isn't going to be anything special until they start testing on a 64-bit platform???

Hear hear - more address space please

[Namarrgon]

Yes, yes it is.

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.