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AMD's 'Newcastle' Budget Athlon64 Chips Analyzed
Edward Scissorhands writes "CNET News.com reported on Thursday that AMD had released a new "budget" Athlon64 CPU. Appearing on the AMD roadmap under the codename of "Newcastle", these chips are identical to the 754-pin Athlon64 3200+ in every way except for the size of their L2 cache (512KB vs. 1MB). CNET suggests that some of these chips may be 3200's that don't pass QA as having full 1MB caches. Newcastle chips are about half the cost of their 1MB cached counterparts, though preliminary benchmarks from Anand indicate favourable performance/price."
This is what many companies do. If certain chips cannot pass Q&A then remark them down and you do not lose your inventory.
cheers
Rick
They are out just a bit too late for the christmas rush.
"Average intelligence is pretty damn stupid"
a processor named after a beer?
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTYw
Kyle of HardOCP makes a bunch of speculations as to AMD's purpose for releasing these chips, and comes to basically the same conclusions that CNet does.
He sugguests that these chips are also just the ones that only had partial working cache (a portion of the cache was working, the other portion was not) and to save money they are selling these as a "budget" chip. Seems like a good idea to me!
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
Sorry, that should be Newcastle
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
the people of Newcastle (working link) will. Long has the North been associated with cheap ;-)
after 2004, the 754-pin sockets will make way for their new 939-pin sockets. AMD has said that they will continue upgrades for 754-pin 64-bit chips up to i think 3700+ After that you will need to buy a 939 pin motherboards. Though I wonder what the shelf life for the 754 pins are, since not that many programs can even make use of 64bit cpus yet.
This is a very good incentive to go 64 bit. I was thinking of getting a 2500 Barton, since my 1800 finally kicked it last week when the cooling fan gave out (this was right after a re-format, so the temperature monitoring system was not installed yet). However, since this came out, it might be a good time to go 64 bit. The chip still packs punch, so its not really what we would tend to think of when the term "budget" comes up (AMD Duron...Intel Celly). Plus, it won't be that expensive to replace if you take the OC too far.
No wait, the other thing: tedious.
I remember this back in the PentiumII/Celeron days, but does this happen anymore? Has anybody looked at the chip to see if it is any smaller or the same size as its bigger brother?
Does 512k vs 1 meg cache make much diff...what kind of performance hit would you see?
In conclusion the Athlon 64 3000+ is one of the best CPUs AMD has never announced. It makes a sub $1,000 system that is 64 bit capable easy to reach, and is able to perform quite admirably even with half of the cache of the other AMD64 CPUs. Will AMD make more 512kb cache Athlon 64s in the near future? How long will Socket 754 continue? Is this 3000+ an overclocker of merit? Stay tuned. For now if you have been craving for a powerful and cheap system with 64 bit onboard then the Athlon 64 3000+ is your CPU. It has no competition in its class, and likely will not for months to come.
Let's see, 1 year since Slashdot has approved a story I've submitted. Let's keep the streak alive! ;) HP shipping Mandrake biz PCs. Who cares!
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
$213USD seems to be the lowest on pricewatch, for those who are wondering
http://www.pricewatch.com/1/3/5867-1.htm
This move by AMD is clearly the result of Intel not contributing enough to Bush's reelection fund. Bush and his evil neo-con allies have it in for Intel and are using AMD as a front to destroy it. No blood for processor preformance!
for those of us who still have our heards stuck in the 32 bit realm, just pretend they're giving us the choice between 256K or 512K...
This is good news. The next month or so will be a great time to buy those boring 32-bit CPU's that nobody cares about anymore. Moore's law rocks.
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
Sorry, this is a bit off topic, but are sites like Anandtech trying to be useless? At least they do include comparisons to the P4 in this review, where often they don't give you enough context to really compare across the board, but now they've switched to using Flash for the charts. Why? It's not like they're "live" or anything.
n g sites soon sink into the mud.
Compared to decent, thoughtful sites like StorageReview, where they at least they let you compare any model to any model, I hope Anand and the other forever-amateur just-enough-info-to-make-you-think-its-worth-buyi
Why would anyone want it?
The cache is allocated physically. It isn't a question of it having 1023 Kbytes instead of 1024 so then being sold as a 512K model...
Could this become the new 'dual celeron' like a couple of years ago?
I don't know what's funnier ... your comment or the possibility that, given the political leanings of a lot of the people who post here, some people will think your serious and not realize it's a joke.
Overclockers.com did a mini-feature on the Newcastles last week, including why you shouldn't buy one too soon.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Given current mechanical properties of the materials that encase the actual chip, the connections from the chip to the pin and the ability to insert chip into a motherboard, is there any impending barrier to the number of pins for future chips?
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Did the article not miss one MAJOR item in the review ---> the Processor is 64 bit capable, taking into account that Windows and nearly all games arn't ready to take advantage of it, this processor will continue to set performance standards as the software becomes 64 bit ready?
Whoop, I hope I understand that correctly (-;
Gamblers Forum
And look at their test results? Apparently not, because the 3200 outperforms Intel's 3.2GHz. Fucking moron.
Maybe on taste tests(youre not supposed eat THOSE chips) , but most real world tests show the Athlon 64 3200 going neck and neck with the P4EE (a jury rigged chip with 2mb of cache that sells for $974 on pricewatch. The only way a pentium 4 2.8 could outperform an athlon 64 is if the Athlon 64 was on a PCchips motherboard and I think the Athlon would beat the Pentium 4 2.8 even then! :P
I think they dedicated these "flawed" chips to the Newcastle Stock Exchange. Fits the Australian profile of doing business.
[Please sign here]
In Moby Dick, Newcastle is an assistant to the navigator who does all the computations.
I like this idea, and from a product-line standpoint, it's a good one. After the Athlon XP line started, I sort of missed the situation with the Thunderbird/Duron, where there was always a low-priced alternative for budget systems.
Perhaps now they will create a sort of "64-bit Duron," a lower-priced and less-powerful version of the Athlon 64. This way, in the future, if I want to create a bargain version of a AMD64 computer for a family member or friend, or buy one, there is a cheaper processor available for such a system.
I sort of missed having that alternative available; this creates a bit of processor nostalgia for me :p
These 'reject' chips might be the reason Emachines offers such a cheap 64 bit computer.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
... or so claimed AMD. Maybe this is why - they are releasing 64-bit chips at prices comparable to mid-range 32-bit ones! Way to go AMD :-)
:-)
I have no particular beef with Intel, btw, it's just that AMD always seem to aim more at value for money. I like that
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I hadn't considered upgrade CPU's to be a big contender for stocking stuffers or under the tree, but maybe I'm just out of touch...
My Slashdot Subscription fights SCO & the RIAA. Your lack of a subscription helps them bankrupt our community.
Not quite. They're on the roadmap for Q1, which would just miss christmas at the earliest.
...has 5 in stock, and that's here in Norway even. So it might not arrive before Christmas, but if you hurry you'll probably still go 64 bit in 2003 :)
I'm perfectly happy with the PC I have though. Usually, whenever Christmas is nearing I get questions about whether I'd want something for my computer. This year, for the first time in as long as I can remember, the answer is "not really". No big itch to scratch... I have CPU, GPU, RAM, HDD enough, broadband, most everything really.
I must say, I'd still like to improve noise and style though. Performance, well it's not that critical anymore. But the noise is pretty bad, even after I replaced my WD disks with Seagate. And I admit a Shuttle XPC + LCD looks ten times better than my beige box. Maybe next PC, but that one is not now. Not for a while yet...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"I would love to see some applications written to take advantage of those extra registers! (Linux apps aside.)"
<Abe Simpson> When I was your age, sonny, we used Motorola 68K CPUs which had sixteen registers (address and data) instead of eight like in those x86 units. And they were all 32-bit in all models of 68K, I tell you! And never you mind that linear 32-bit addressing... Why, back then you could go to a movie, eat at a fancy restaurant, and buy a gallon of gas all for a nickel... Zzzzzz..</Abe Simpson>
Does the label read:
"Made with sand from the banks of the Tyne"?
...the poor sap that can barely afford to spend the extra money on the 'value' board, you listen to someone's spiel about how you can 'unlock' the 'magic' or something and you end up frying your once perfectly good, yet low-spec'd board and are stuck having to go back to your old parts, if those aren't fried as well.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Crocodile shooooes!
Stick Men
Does it run linux?
ducks and runs for cover...
> Maybe on taste tests
m l
Not really. Go through the tests performed during THG review of Opteron and Athlon64.
Intel P4 2.8(!) GHz outperforms AMD Athlon 64 3200+ on almost all tests.
See http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030923/index.ht
This CPU is a good deal, Athlon 64 at Athlon XP prices. Some of us actually need to buy machines now, not in the next 6 months. Oh, wait to find a socket 939 processor at $200 like that jackass Ed is saying. With luck, it will only take until Xmas next year.
Be worried if they release CPU's named after presidents... and you have the 'Pretzel' motherboard edition and a certain CPU edition, things are bound to go wrong.
I suppose instead of "hello world", you could have "heimlich maneuver".
;-)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Have you considered the Antec Sonata case?
(And of course, the other options like quieter CPU fans, quieter exhaust fans, quieter power supplies. For my home office, 2004 is the year of "quiet", my goal is to make a serious dent in the amount of PC noise going on in here.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Dont you just love the way that AMD dropped this 64bit chip on the market - WITHOUT WAITING FOR MICROSOFT TO CATCH UP - Like, trust that Linux support alone will be enough to push this thing into the low-end 64bit market.
And its selling like hot cakes - so the market is proving them right.
Maybe it is a sign of things to come - hardware vendors pushing forward and bringing real innovation back into PeeCees, knowing that Linux alone will be there to support the innovations, and that Linux support is enough to drive sales.
Remember how back in the good old days, Hardware makers (Commodore, Atari, Apple, etc) were free to introduce radical new hardware every 12 months, with no regard to operating software portability - they knew that the software guys were capable of keeping up back then.
The current situation, with Microsoft being the sole supplier of OS's means that any new hardware has to conform to some horrid, and aging 'standard' invented back in the 80's, simply because Microsoft seems to be incapable of keeping pace with innovations in hardware.
Well done AMD - for daring to break the status Quo, and for sticking one up Microsoft at the same time.
Here's example systems you could build, with the best possible motherboards. Each assumes you need to buy some DDR400 RAM so that is not included, since it's all the same:
My Athlon XP system:
Athlon XP 2800+: $150
Abit NF7: $100
Total: $250
I'm quite happy with it. Best price/performance choice (last week, anyway.)
Top-End Athlon XP system:
Athlon XP 3200+: $289
Abit NF7: $100
Total: $389
A complete waste of money, especially after today.
P4 3.2 system for comparison:
P4 3.2 CPU: $366
Asus P4C800-E: $164
Total: $530
Better than both of the above, but only by a few percent for most things.
That was the situation last week. Including an Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, or P4Extreme in the examples would have been useless since they're insanely expensive.
However:
Athlon 64 system you can build now:
Athlon 64 3000+ 512k cache: $230
Gigabyte GAK8VT800M: $106
Total: $336
Yowza.
So, to jump from the top-end Athlon XP to an entry level Athlon 64 actually saves you $53. I could have spent an extra $86 and got all this. The Athlon 64 system will now save you $194 over the best P4 Intel has to offer, and it will beat it (for virtually all applications.) Of course, if $336 is too much, you can still build a good Athlon XP system and cut costs dramatically, but $336 is very reasonable for building a brand new system. It'll be interesting when Intel gets it's P4Extreme down to a reasonable price, and AMD starts ratcheting up the Athlon 64 speeds.
Proves it's always better to wait just one more week. I should have known that there would be major cuts in the 64-bit world soon after the processor debut.
Hope all this is useful to anyone considering building a system. Keep in mind that 1gb of dual-channel DDR400 RAM is gonna run at least $150.
All prices are PriceWatch.com and the Athlon 64 CPU price is from a link on AnandTech. I know PriceWatch prices are hard to get and you have to deal with shipping and all that.
# Erik
Tom's Hardware? Please!
That they are free (as in beer).
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
There should be additional Athlon-only tests with SuSE SLES 8 SP3 or/and SuSE Linux 9.0.
even then the athlon 64 beats the 3.2 p4 80% of the time...and the fx-51 runs pretty close to the P4EE, remember the P4EE is an optimized THIRTY TWO bit chip... Athlon 64 is not even running in 64 bit mode on those games.
I've found that Tom's benchmarks almost never line up with what the rest of the hardware sites are reporting. Now... Which is more likely fudged a bit. A single, large hardware site, or just about every other hardware site on the net?
These 'reject' chips are being sold as the Athlon 64 3000+. The chips in the Emachines box you linked to are the Athlon 64 3200+. Same clock speed, the 3200+ just has twice the cache over the 3000+.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
don't you mean "loose"?
Whatever AMD does, they always make better performance for price.
-------
FM Clan
Commodore 64!
(spooky to think that this processor alone has more memory than that entire computer!)
Many reviewers (not only THG) noticed that AMD became much more agressive with their ratings starting about 1.5 years ago. It's a fact.
IMHO, on 32-bit, Intel provides better price/performance ratio now.
123,345,334.4 pins.
Any more and the world will turn into one like the one Homer was on that rained donuts!
Athlon 64 3200+ beats the P4 2.8 in the majority of the tests shown in your citation.
Oh wait were not talking about beer are we?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Everybody knows Tom's is horribly pro-Intel. He actually had a disclaimer on his main page a few months ago saying Intel advertising was something like 37% of his revenue. Right when I read that, I deleted THG from my bookmarks, as it totally confirmed what I thought all along.
Damn, too cheap for a 'k' huh?
There are some people that you can just tell needed that computer to bring a little bit of joy into their life and barely had the money to do much else then get that computer and when you have to tell them that they are out of luck, it's not a great feeling.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I found this little gem while going over AMD64 reviews...
#8, I'm typing this on an XP2100+ and we can both sleep soundly tonight knowing this has nothing to do with my ego or with blinders. I am farting sunshine over the fact the A64 performs so well clock-for-clock and I am looking forward to building my next workstation as a 64-bit platform.
Granted it was a few months back, but I think we're all farting sunshine now.
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
You're right about choosing the xp2500... the 2800+ is just taxation on the stupid. The parent also quoted "price/performance", which results in a lower number as performance increases.
I prefer "performance/price" which results in a higher number as performance increases (and price stays constant).
I would also recommend the Asus board.
Common sense posts are doomed to 1 pnt scores.
Pro Bush, Pro AMD, and Pro DiVX encoding. Gimme some of that 64 bit love!
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I have an Antec Sonata and fucking love it. I don't ever hear it running, I don't hear the fans, etc. Also the fans and hard drive cages use rubber grommets to reduce vibration. Great case.
What a great marketing name for a 64 bit product!
No need for the expensive case. Get urself some insulating material kits, a quiet cpu fan, a zalman silent gpu cooler, a few near silent case fans, and you should be good. Worked great for me, I went to having an AC unit under my desk to having a whisper. It was nice, and to this from not being able to sleep.
Hmm... I already decided that my next system would be dual-CPU. Can that be done with this processor? I've so far remained pretty ignorant as to the technicalities behind dual-CPU systems. Does one need an Athlon MP processor to go dual in an AMD world?
PENISBIRD does not belong to GNAA you liars.
Yah! 64 bit processors! Oh wait... I've had several Alpha's for years.. Nevermind.
I work in the city of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, where Newcastle Brown Ale is brewed. I find it offensive that you think it is just a name for beer, rather than the name of the town where the beer is brewed.
Of course you need the chip with 1024KB and not the one with 512KB !
Then all your 640KB dos memory and even your high memory will run from the cache!