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."

Comments

Many companies do this...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Many companies do this...

[Zathrus]

They're on the roadmap for Q1, which would just miss christmas at the earliest.

To be technical, Q1 would just miss this year at the earliest.

That said -- you didn't read the article, did you (feign shocked surprise)? The chips aren't supposed to be out yet according to the roadmap, but they are. You can order them at a reseller near you (they're available cheaper elsewhere, but I like vendors that never, ever give me trouble, ship on time (or ahead of time), and have good return policies) right now and AMD added them to their pricing sheets on Dec 15. So it's an official product that got out ahead of time.

Of course, unless you have someone who stocks them locally you'll be hardpressed to actually get it before Christmas. There's always overnight shipping, but that'll eat a large chunk of the money you're saving over the 3200+.

Re:Many companies do this...

[Sivar]

Not quite. They're on the roadmap for Q1, which would just miss christmas at the earliest.

Roadmap or not, you can buy 512K cache Athlon64s right now.

[H]ardOCP has had this story for a few days now

[unborracho]

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!

Re:[H]ardOCP has had this story for a few days now

[Zathrus]

Argh. No.

The 386SX was a completely and utterly different chip from the 386DX. The SX only had a 16-bit data path while the DX had a full 32-bit data path. This is not a minor change in the chip or board layout -- in fact, one of the major reasons that Intel released the 386SX was to reduce transition costs from 286 motherboards -- there's considerably less difference between 286 and 386SX than 286 and 386. The 386SX had no feature differences -- it was just slower.

I believe what you're thinking of is 486DX vs 486SX. The 486DX was the first Intel chip (in the 80x86 line) to integrate the FPU onboard. The 486SX didn't have the FPU, or the FPU was disabled post-manufacture (most likely due to failures in the FPU module, while the rest of the chip was fine). This is something that can be done during product test.

The funny thing about that was the poor schmucks who bought a 486SX and then decided they wanted the FPU after all... there was a second processor socket onboard, and when the "FPU" was plugged in it simply disabled the primary CPU completely -- the "FPU" chip was a full fledged 486DX. IIRC, there was another varient where the second CPU sat on top of the first CPU (and disabled it), but I can't recall for sure.

Re:AMD changing pin # anyway

[unborracho]

There haven't been any official statements that their new processors are going 939-pin.. that is a speculation by a few highly-voiced individuals and off-the-record statements

price?

[Nate Fox]

$213USD seems to be the lowest on pricewatch, for those who are wondering
http://www.pricewatch.com/1/3/5867-1.htm

Re:AMD changing pin # anyway

[the_2nd_coming]

well since they run 32 bit code natively and FASTER than the top of the line P4, I would say the shelf life is good.

Re:Not quite fresh news...

[Kazymyr]

Link for the above.

Re:AMD changing pin # anyway

[Jeff DeMaagd]

As it is the 9xx pin FX jobs don't really have that much of a reason to exist yet because the performance increase is marginal, maybe 5%. Sometimes dual channel actually slows things down by a percent or two. I hope that this changes before the 7xx pin version goes away. I imagine that at a higher clock the difference becomes more noticable.

The only reason to get a 9xx pin chip is to get multiprocessing in the form of Opteron.

Re:If it didn't pass QA

[Kazymyr]

The cache is allocated in blocks. There are 2 512k blocks, and if there are bad cells in just one of them, it is disabled and the chip is sold with only 1 512k block enabled. If there are bad cells in both, they throw it away.

Well, my time-travelling webshop...

[Kjella]

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

Re: Quieter machines

[WuphonsReach]

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.)

sample buildouts

[erikdotla]

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.

Re:"32bit computing is dead"

[raodin]

Ah yes, good ol' fud. CURRENT top of the line Intel processors run hotter and consume more power than top of the line AMD processors. You're a good 4 major revisions behind on your info. The Thunderbird was the last really hot Athlon (and it really wasn't THAT bad) They cooled off considerably with the release of the Palamino, and again with the Thoroughbred. Barton is basically the same as the Tbred, and the A64 chips don't seem to be running too hot, either.

Who cares how good the retail "hintsinks" are. They're pretty decent, these days, but anyone who cares will replace it with a better performing model. No different than with Intel CPUs.

You're entitled your opinion, but your post is pretty much just 3 year old FUD.