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Athlon 64 3400+ Reviewed
SpinnerBait writes "Unlike the Athlon 64 FX-51, this new
3400+ rated Processor, has a 64 bit memory interface, with its integrated memory
controller, drops in at several hundred dollars less than an FX-51 and is also
clocked at 2.2GHz. It gives a P4 3.2GHz Canterwood based machine a run for
its money too, as
this review with benchmarks at HotHardware reports. And where is
Prescott? Fortunately for AMD, it's a bit tardy to market and this will give this new Athlon 64 speed bin time to take a firm hold."
Is it worth getting _any_ machine without planning to use Linux?
Microsoft has Windows XP for 64-bit AMD chips in beta, and should have a release out soon. From what I saw earlier, they had a pretty good transition plan in place, with 32-bit programs being partioned from 64-bit ones. I imagine in the short term, companies will simply include both versions if they have a 64-bit version available. The chip is still going to run 32-bit programs about as fast as a 32-bit cpu at the speed according to benchmarks I've seen.
Please add links to any reviews that run 64-bit linux (or other 64-bit OS of choice) with 64-bit benchmarks on said processor:
fineprint: I don't need a lecture on the nature of 64-bitness.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
"I don't think that most people do the really computer intensive tasks that would benefit from 64bit chips"
Everyone would benefit from switching because of the extra registers in 64-bit mode and the low-latency memory controller. Some people have said they got a 10-20% speedup just from recompiling in 64-bit mode without making any changes to their code.
Of course if all you do is run Word all day that will make little difference... but if all you do is run Word all day you'd probably be happy with a Pentium-II.
Well, that review sucked, at least be normal anandtech standarts. Hey, its a CPU bench, so why are 2/3 of the game benches gpu-limited and all processors are within 2-3%?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Maybe your ignorance could be moderated according.
Could be it was an honest question. Not everyone in the world uses english as their primary language. (including myself)
And even then there could be problems. (see dunno-what-speakin'-Bush: "mis-underestimating")
I'd hardly call not knowing what a speed bin is "ignorant". The poster didn't know, wasn't trying to be funny about it (AFAICT) and isn't responsible for the moderation it got.
for me only Mathematica will run in the 32bit (slower) mode.
*sigh*
You fanboys just dont get it. 32 bit vs 64 bit has nothing to do with speed. The 32 bit mode that Mathematica runs in is not the "slower" mode. All of the performance increases in Athlon64 are due to architectural enhancements that are completely independant of the size of the registers...
Because a good majority of IT professionals don't have time to deal with instability, testing, high-performance cooling, or nonsense like that. In the Real World, I need a machine that can render reliably on a daily basis. Overclocking is fun, at home, as a hobby. In the office from 9 to 5, machines need to come out of the box and "just work".
The fact that they can run 32-bit apps under a 32-bit OS at pretty much the same speed as a 32-bit CPU is surely a huge yawn (but great for backward compatability.)
Has anyone seen any comparative benchmarks under a 64-bit Linux system?
On most of the roads in the nation, the speed limit is either 55MPH or 65MPH. Some places out West on the Interstates, it's 75MPH. Even a 100MPH speedometer is WAY overdesigned, well past short-term bursts for passing, accident avoidance, and the like.
So why do we have speedometers that go up so high, and why can many cars actually go that fast? After all, it's illegal, and we don't NEED that speed, or speedometer.
Perhaps we really do - about as much as a 64-bit processor.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
OK, you lot seem to be way over analysing this.
..becomes..
it looks like a simple bloody typo:
"this will give this new Athlon 64 speed bin time to take a firm hold"
"this will give this new Athlon 64 speed in time to take a firm hold"
i doubt it has anything to do with grading the processors or anything......
liqbase
I wouldn't be too surprised if AMD chose to withhold faster versions of the Athlon64 FX-series until any Prescott is just about to be released. A day before or so. Leap-frogging at its finest.
Well, in all my testing of running 16 bit apps, a Pentium I outran a similarly clocked P4 by a healthy margin - so obviously the Pentium is a better chip, right?
</sarcasm>
Seriously - For a period of time the A64 will be running mostly 32 bit apps (at least in the Windows world), and so it is fair to benchmark its performance against 32 bit apps. But I cannot help but wonder how much P4 tweaking all those apps had, and how much A64 tweaking they did not have.
Also, the memory performance tests are, to my mind, somewhat questionable as well, as different CPUs even within the Pentium line have different memory access behavior - code that will be bus limited on a P4 might not be bus limited on a P3.
I am not saying the comparisons are not useful, but I am saying that they don't tell the whole story. Let us see some benchmarks wherein the A64 is running code that is written for the A64 - using the extra registers and so on.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The reason AMD build a 64 bit chip. You have to understand the changes going on on the server markets. In short x86 caught up with proprietary architectures. Realize that it probably takes about $2 billion to develop a processor architecture (I'm probably low here, but you get the idea). Let's assume that 15 million server processors are sold annually. Sun ships about 300k servers a quarter and has 1/3 of the market, most of them are at the lower end (ie lots more 1-4 processor systems than 72 processor systems). If a design lasts 2 years, each of the three big architecutres have about 10 million processors to spread design costs over, or about $200 in R&D costs per processor.
Because of the PC market, Intel and AMD combine to sell 130 million processors annually (100 million for Intel and 30 for AMD. If they spend the same $2 billion on a processor design and their desings also last 2 years AMD can spread development costs over 60 million processors for about $30 per chip. If they can sell these chips into the server market, they have a $170 R&D advantage over the propretary architectures, even if consumers never use 64 bit features (buying them only because they are fast or cheap. They are quite willing to add something that allows them to compete quite effectivly in the server market even if it makes the chips cost a little more in the consumer market. This is why Xeon is selling like hotcakes, while Itanium lingers on the shelves.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The problem with the G5 is that the upgrade path is much more costly. You just can't go to Pricewatch and drop in a new motherboard.
The reviews are all the same--run various permutations of the PC through benchmarks, and display the results using bar charts. And not just any bar charts. Use a gradient to color the bar, so that the color legend is rendered useless.
The reviewers should read Tufte, and figure out a more effective way of illustrating their analyses than endless pages of bar charts. Oh wait, that's how they get their ad revenue. Never mind.
Indeed the word "overclock" has become my hardware review spam filter; it has a strong "cold fusion" connotation. If I drop $700 on a CPU, I will not be running it out of spec in any way. If I'm that hungry for speed, I'll build a cluster.
I can understand people wanting to overclock, say, a P-III 933 to see how far they can push it, but I just don't get the fanboy fascination with extreme cooling, adding a few megahertz, etc. Reading this stuff in a tech article is like finding an article on adding a whaletail to a ricer in Car&Driver - it just doesn't belong in a serious text.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman