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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
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
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.
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!
If an application is frequently accessing a reasonably small set of code and data, and the total size of the accessed code and data is less than the size of the L2 cache, then the application can run from within the cache, which is much faster than main memory. The size of the L2 cache directly affects the point at which this speed benefit can be realized.
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
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
Cache is not all or nothing. Let's say 934k of 1024k work. Turn off 512k including all the non-working memory and voila -- sellable budget processor. AMD chose the 50% line arbitrarily -- they could have chosen 75% and gotten fewer, higher performance processors or 25% and gotten more, lower performance processors.
They can't actually tell you how much of the cache works because OEMs like to sell identical machines, i.e. all with 512k cache, not 512k cache or more.
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.
I'm not sure, but I would think that as long as they could find 512K of contiguous cache that passes, they could use just that without any major modifications.
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.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
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
... 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!
Obviously, to keep other sites and everyone else from "stealing" their charts. I know it's a pain in the ass, but Anand is a pretty large and profitable review site. If their charts were just JPGs, what's to stop some unscrupulous site from snatching their pics, changing the colors in a batch job, and reposting the results as their own? Granted, they could probably just screen-cap their pics now, but that involves a little more work.
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
...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
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.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
They can still copy the Flash files as well. Makes no bloody difference, expect they are using non W3C standards. Bad, very bad.
Wrong. It doens't work that way. They don't, on a processor by processor basis, go in and "disable" the random parts of any Cache area that failed testing.
ASS HAT Moderators too.
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.
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
Bandwith - the major cost of runing any hardware review site. By making a simple flash movie that displays a graph based upon passed in text data, they save bandwith. You download the flash movie once (or once every time they update it), and then everytime they display a graph your browser uses the cached movie, but with the new param set for what data labels and values to display. Sending even 15 lines of data is a lot smaller than sending a 300x120 pixel image for every single graph - especialy when a multi-page review may have 15+ graphs.
Yes, it sucks for the user who has to download whatever version of flash they use - and it sucks even more if the version they require is so new it isn't avail on all platforms, but they Do have a good reason.
man is machine
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?
AMD's Athlon MP is their 32 bit dual processor capable offering, Opteron is their 64 bit dual capable. Athlon64/64-FX are NOT dual capable.
I don't know about this chip specifically, but for chips in general there would be more than just two blocks. In fact, it would probably be along the lines of 36 cells of 32K a piece. If any of these cells fail validation, you can disable them.
So long as the number of busted cells is 4 or less (just using my example numbers here), you can sell the processor with 1024KB of cache enabled. Obviously, if there are no cells that are bad you still disable 4 of them to keep the parts consistant (OEMs don't want one chip with 1024KB of cache, the next with 1056KB of cache and the next with only 992KB). If more than 4 cells are bad, you disable all but 16 of them and you've got a chip with 512KB of cache.
Intel and AMD both do this (as do others), and at various times both have had chips sold at different performance and price points depending on how much cache (or some other feature, ie hypertransport links, hyperthreading, floating point units, etc.) is enabled.
How the fuck? BTW, a NetBurst Celery has half the L2 cache, which doesn't sound as bad at first, but when you realize that the cache is what's keeping NetBurst CPUs from going into the gutter performance wise, the Celeries suck - just look at Anand's benchmarks of sub-$100 Intel and AMD CPUs (with a 1.8A P4 as a baseline) - except for the Duron 1.6, AMD CPUs and the P4 MURDERED Celeries. As for the Duron, it usually held it's own against the Celeries and 1.8 P4.