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Athlon64 Motherboards And Chips Compared
An anonymous reader writes "Just noticed that OverclockersClub has a new article (free, no reg, blah blah blah) that describes the AMD64 processors. The article talks about the differences in each processor and compares them as well as puts everything in a nice easy to read chart. Pretty nice article if you aren't familiar with all the new tech."
Makes a good match for
Johnny-boy's submission. He writes "HardwareZone has a 46 page article out that compares many of the Athlon64 motherboards out on the market now. If you are planning to get that Socket-754 motherboard, maybe this article is worth a look."
Now really isn't the time to get an Athlon.
The 939 pin athlons are just around the corner, which is the migration path of most of the athlon sets.
754 series sets will still only have a single channel 128 bit pathway. It's not worth it.
Wait until the 939 pin, and get dual channel memory transfer in a non-FX Athlon64. Even if you're only getting half the cache (1 meg vs 512kb) on the 939 pin versions, chances are you will be able to overclock it more because it's a smaller die space.
46 pages... I wanted a motherboard review, not a dissertation :)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I was actually looking into Athlon 64's today; and i'm not seeing the price benefit compared to a PowerMac G5.
Right now, there's no GREAT 64 bit OS out there (linux, forget XP 64bit) I think we should treat Athlon64 like MacOS 10.0 (sorry, i'm a mac guy) for early adopters only
Give it another 6 months, then it'll be a great server/workstation solution
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Back a few years ago, these speed increases really meant something. It meant the difference between waiting for the OS to finish some task and being able to use the computer without much noticeable latency. These days, the difference just isn't as staggering.
I will admit, though, that if you use KDE/Linux there are some things that could definitely use a speed-up like switching between apps and loading the GUI shell. However, beyond that, modern operating systems work just fine with today's processors.
The argument to this is always "what if you're doing serious number crunching or graphical rendering?", but the answer to that is that there are dedicated DSPs out there that can perform those computations much more efficiently than the CPU. Relying on the CPU to give good Quake framerates is like relying on your auto-body shop to soup up your ricer. Yes, there are some increases in performance, but the real horsepower behind these things lies in the video card and engine, not in the CPU and rice spoiler.
I'm all for improvements in chip technology, but software lags so far behind the capabilities of modern CPUs that it's preposterous to climb on the upgrade cycle, regardless of the circumstances.
I have been pwned because my
I wrote an AMD64 article a while ago... something a little simpler, for those not so technically-minded:
AMD 64 Explained
Someone said above that there are no good AMD64 OSes... bullshit... SuSE 9.0 AMD64 is more than usable, and FreeBSD 5.2 AMD64 is almost perfect; in fact I'm typing this from Mozilla Firebird on FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE AMD64 right now.
-Jem
Would someone mind telling me the difference between the 939 pin and the 940 pin? What difference can that one pin make?
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
Let's see the Motherboards are about 8 inches square but the chips are much smaller ...
Perhaps the only reason not to move to the AMD 64 platform is the entry price, currently. The early adopters will take care of knocking that down for the rest of us.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Of course.
Starfox 64
Mario Cart 64
Random Nintendo Franchise 64
Oh wait... for the computer then no.
Most open-source projects are now in the process of, or have completed AMD64 compatibility. I'm typing this from Mozilla Firebird on AMD64 FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. I have a whole bunch of programs from the Ports system that work perfectly... the ones that aren't ported yet are the proprietary clones, like the Flash plugin, GAIM, and Java. Opera doesn't work in 64-bit mode yet either, neither does TextMaker.
-JemAMD's roadmap is simple: faster processors as soon as possible.
All you have to do is worry about how much computational power you want and how much money you want to spend on a CPU and motherboard.
Let's face it, if you hope to see an appreciable speed bump when you upgrade, buying a first-generation chip and plugging it into a first-generation motherboard with the expectation that you'll get that big speed bump when you plug in a second- or third-generation chip a couple of year's down the line is the wrong way to go about it. Yes, the new CPU will have a faster clock speed but the rest of the motherboard will be two years out of date.
Take my AMD Athlon motherboard as an example. When I bought it a couple of years back, together with an 1200MHz CPU (then the second fastest chip in the range), it had all the latest bells and whistles. But today, its support for USB 1.1, DDR2700 RAM and even PATA RAID make in far inferior to the vast number of motherboards out there that support USB 2.0, DDR3200 and 3500 RAM and SATA RAID, not to mention IEEE 1394 (FireWire), Gigabit Ethernet, better POST reporting, etc.(I won't even start to debate the performance benefits of newer nForce2 Ultra chipsets over their older counterparts.)
To match the features of the latest AMD Athlon/Athlon XP motherboards with my older motherboard I would have to add in at least two, maybe three or four, PCI cards. This would work, but it would be an inelegant (taking up valuable PCI slots), costly (PCI cards aren't free) and inefficient (PCI cards require drivers, configuration, etc) solution. Far better and cheaper to upgrade the motherboard along with the CPU in one go, allowing me to put the older motherboard and CPU combination into another machine/my spares box/the charity bin.
Seriously, when buying a motherboard and CPU, look past the upgrade path. It's a serious red herring, even for PC enthusiasts such as ourselves.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
If I do recall there is a gentoo live CD out right now.. In fact the gentoo page has a Athlon 64 faq out here:e s. html
http://dev.gentoo.org/~brad_mssw/amd64-tech-not
Now, like all new technologies, there maybe certains apps that don't work, compilations errors, and other problems... But how will they be fixed unless people try it, and send back bug reports?
There are still many tasks for which there isn't enough computing power for. Factoring large prime numbers, encoding/editing video, rendering 3D graphics, applying audio filters, etc...
Every time a newer/faster/better CPU comes out, someone says it is not needed for the majority of computing users. While that may be true currently, who would want to tolerate using a 386SX/16 today just because current 32-bit X86 proccessors are really just souped up 386s?
If you're happy with your old processor, keep using it. No one is going to take it away from you. Chances are, you'll start to see the benefit from more powerful processors and applications that take advantage of what they can do and you'll upgrade just as you probably have in the past. You're not still using an abacus are you?
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
According to the side by side comparasion chart there's 1 megakilobyte of L2 cache on the 64-FX! With a gig of memory on die, no wonder it's so expensive.
I wish I'd done more research on hardware compatibility, particularly motherboards, because installing 64-bit Linux has been a bitch. I'm only now getting to the point where I can have a fully-working installation without having to add in redundant devices to compensate for onboard chipsets that AMD64 Linux distros couldn't work with.
Nvidia Nforce drivers only got released in the last month so my onboard LAN on my ASUS SK8N works. Mandrake 9.2 RC1 recognizes my Promise onboard SATA RAID controller, but SuSE doesn't, and even then the driver in Mandrake is an 0.83 release.
I haven't played with the Fedora Core release candidate test version for Athlon 64 yet.
IMO, If you want to run 64-bit Native Linux on AMD64 without a lot of headaches and weeping, wait another 6 months until the distros and drivers have solidified more. In 6 months, you'll probably be able to get a CPU a generation or two higher than you can today, but for the same money, and you'll be able to install AMD64 native Linux much more easily... It's win-win.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Athlon 64 runs rings around a G5? Really? Have you got both to demonstrate this, or is this from reading reviews on the web?
I write DSP code, and i've got some very impressive results from a G5 when running code which previously gave less than exciting results on a G4. The G5 really is a class act.
I've not tested the code on an Athlon 64, but only on an Athlon XP 2500. DSP code tends to be FPU or memory bound, sometimes both in different parts of the algorithm so it is pretty good at giving a machine a proper workout.
My XP 2500 is running roughly at 2Ghz, and compared to a G5 at 2Ghz the Athlon takes around 50 to 100% longer to run the same tests. That's comparing a G5/gcc 3.3 build against a x86/VC7 build. Neither is the best compiler for the platform, but both are pretty useful, and possibly typical for currently released software.
I'd be very interested in running this build on an Athlon 64 - that'll still be a 32 bit test, but it would be interesting for me to see the benefits of the on chip memory interface. Rebuilding for 64 bits might take a while since the code is large (and ugly). Anyone with a spare 5 minutes willing to run a binary for me?
Commodore already did it in the 80s!
AMD64 is an instruction set, or more specifially, it is a 64-bit extension to the IA-32 instruction set (which, in itself, was an extension of the 16-bit x86 instruction set, and so on). AMD64 often goes by the name x86-64, which is the original name for the instruction set early on in the development cycle.
The AMD Opteron is a processor that uses the AMD64 instruction set. It is designed for workstations and servers and can be used in a glueless SMP setup for up to 8 processors (>8 processors is possible but requires extra core logic chips to connect them together). It runs at clock speeds of 1.6GHz up to 2.2GHz (current top speed), has 1MB of L2 cache and 128-bit wide memory controller integrated onto the die, as well as 3 hypertransport links for interprocessor communication and I/O. It is marketed under model numbers such as 140, 246, 848, etc, with the first number indicating the maximum number of processors usuable in an SMP system (1xx chips for uniprocessor systems, 2xx for duals and 8xx for up to 8-way systems) and the second two numbers showing relative performance. Personally I am quite fond of this particular numbering scheme for the processors.
The AMD Athlon64 is another processor that supports the AMD64 instruction set. It is designed for desktops and mobile systems, so it will not work in multiprocessor configurations. Currently it runs at 2.0 or 2.2GHz with 2.4GHz chips on the horizon. They have either 1MB or 512KB of L2 cache, depending on the model, either a 64-bit or 128-bit memory controller (again, depending on the model), and are sold using two main model numbe schemes. The first is for the stock-Athlon64, which are sold as 3000+, 3200+, 3400+, etc. These numbers show a rough approximation of their performance as compared to an Intel P4 running at the 3.0GHz, 3.2GHz and 3.4GHz (AMD may not say this officially, but it's fairly obvious that this is the intention of the model numbers). I don't like this model number scheme too much, but on the other hand I don't find it any better or worse than the totally useless clock speed (MHz or GHz) rating that is traditionally used to sell chips. The second model scheme is for the Athlon64 FX line of chips, a chip targeted at the high-end "enthusiast" market (read: bratty kid gamers with too much of their parents money on their hands). These chips are sold as the Athlon64 FX 51 and the upcoming Athlon64 FX 53, with the numbers merely referencing the relative performance of the chips.
Hope that clears a thing or two up. For more information, RTFA!