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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.

9 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. don't bother with the FX yet by Tumbleweed · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Betas Of Athlon64 Optimized Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Quote from the article by The+One+KEA · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  4. Re:Hang on.. by FatherOfONe · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  5. Most Only 32 Bits... by MBCook · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    --
    Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
    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.

  6. Re:Most Only 32 Bits... FOUND IT by MBCook · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  7. Re:Memory mapped disk? by ianezz · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

  8. Re:Hang on.. by WoTG · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).