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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."
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.
That's pretty standard practice in hardware manufacturing. It also explains the reasons why some hardware (Radeon 9500, etc) can be "unlocked" and turned into the real thing. They don't actually test "every" part at first, just samples of a batch. If X% fail the full spec, the entire batch is remarked as reduced-spec parts. They they are individually tested at the lower spec. It stands to reason that a certain number of these part would have passed the more rigorous full-spec tests, thus us "cheap" buyers can sometimes get lucky and get a nice piece of hardware for a small price.
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.
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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.
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
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
Yes, but conversely Linux can take advantage of it - SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat and Gentoo all have functioning offerings available for purchase or download.
The only game I know of off the top of my head is Epic's Unreal Tournament 2003.
Either way, the Athlon 64 3000+, IMO, might just be what AMD is looking for to really break into the market. If the price goes below $200, then things will definitely start to get interesting for Intel.
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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.
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?