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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."
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.
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?
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 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?