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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."
The Itanium is too expensive and slow. Ditto Sparc. AMD 64 bit servers running 64bit Java VMs will make for a killer combination.
http://anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1941
"I drank what?" - Socrates
Found this little gem in the article:
It kept our CPU running in the mid -40C range while gaming at default clock speeds.
Last AMD I had ran hot enough to roast a turkey from 10 feet away. -40C would freeze it solid.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
"We found the heatsink to work quite well. It kept our CPU running in the mid -40C range while gaming at default clock speeds."
If your CPU runs at -40C, you have something very special. I, for one, would be worried about condensation from water becoming ice on contact with the CPU at that temperature!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Anandtech
Looks like a winner to me!
Mod parent down. The tarrato link will redirect you to goatse.cx
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Well not that I'm buying one anytime soon, but it's nice to know that once I buy one, I'll get a Linux distro, that is compiled & optimized for a 64bit CPU. So for me only Mathematica will run in the 32bit (slower) mode. But Gimp, mplayer, video editing apps, hell even twm and xclock, will be compiled for 64bit CPUs.
I was wondering how is this going to be sorted out by application vendors on PCs? Are they going to release 64bit and 32bit versions? Is every CD going to contain both? What about 3rd party plugins? I've been asking the same question actually about Apple's G5, but www.apple.com (and I didn't search too carefuly) is bit short on nasty details like this. Is it really worth getting a 64bit machine without planning to use Linux?
Looks pretty good. I still don't think there is a huge demand to have these in desktops as of yet. P4s are still very powerful and still compete with AMDs 64 bit chips. Even the Athlons are enough for most people to play the newest games and all.
I don't think that most people do the really computer intensive tasks that would benefit from 64bit chips plus the lack of truely 64 bit software that will give them this advantage is a hinderance as well.
I think it will be 2005 or maybe even 2006 before 64 bit chips become the standard.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Have anyone tried to encode xvid with one of these in 32 and 64 bit, preferebly using Linux? Is there much difference in speed? I'm looking at the 3000+ part as it is cheap but there are zero and none benchmarks to back it up in 64 bit mode.
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.
Why is this moderated as 'funny' and not 'ignorant' :-P ?
Processor makers 'bin' processors. That is, they try for the fastest speed, but if the chip doesn't make it, it get's 'binned' dowm the line and tried as a lower-speed chip. They can also 'bin' due to market-reasons (putting hi-grade chips in the low-speed bin because of demand, etc)
Guys we have all the reviews listed on our main page, and I'm adding more as they come in. It currently totals at 19. Does Hothardware pay Slashdot for these links? ;)
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
Also does anyone have an idea how expensive the AMD 3400+ chips are? Because the AMD 3200+ chips are $400 retail. The article quoted a price for a thousand quantities but I was wondering how much it would cost for just one. Because if its pricey enough the P4 3.2 may beat out the 3400+ dollar for dollar.
Though Intel doesn't have to really worry about that title. At $164 the Pentium P4C smokes the pants off any AMD processor in its price range. At least, after overclocking it to 3 GHz, which is very doable even with standard cooling.
What's a speed bin?
In case you're not trolling, chip manufacturers crank out one design of chip, test it, then put them into bins based on how fast they can run reliably. They probably don't actually use plastic bins, but you get the idea.
Thus, a "speed bin" - a lot of chips designated to run at a certain speed, despite the fact that it's the same design and metal as a chip designated to run at a slower speed.
Due to minor process variations (random faults in materials, equipment, background radiation etc.) every manufactured chip is different. Some chips work fine at higher speeds, some chips only work properly at lower speeds, some chips fail to work at all. Since these microprocessors are at the cutting edge of silicon process technology, the variation matters. Now, to sort out which chip works at which clock speed, the manufacturer has to test every chip and classify them accordingly. Some are sold as 2 GHz chips, some are sold as 1.8 GHz chips, and so on. These different grades are called "speed bins".
When was the last time you were outside?
I expect they meant to use a tilda ('~') instead of a minus ('-'), so as to indicate "about" instead of "negative."
The best a heatsink can ever hope for is to cool to the ambient air temperature, and we won't see anything aproach that until we have superconducting heatsinks. (Imagine a large superconducting mass in the ground with a superconducting cable connecting it to the CPU to draw off heat: power outlets with a pin for cooling, superconducting traces on circuit boards for cooling, and no need for fans.)
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.
I've ported the HotSpot VM to AMD64 for Blackdown. It's noticable faster the 32-bit version in allmost all benchmarks. The main reason for the performance gain is that you have more registers in 64-bit mode.