Anand Reviews Athlon 64 FX-53

trickofperspective writes "Anandtech has a review of AMD's latest processor, the Athlon 64 FX-53. Long story short -- the FX-53 is a "very solid processor," but you'd be better off waiting a couple months for Socket 939."

Comments

Addendum

[Anonymous Coward]

Tom's review is here.

Re:Addendum

[coughman]

Extremetech also has a review too. They have a more negative opinion. link

Re:Virus protection on the chip?

[RealErmine]

It just means that it has buffer overflow protection integrated into the silicon. This is just good engineering practice rather than an Orwellian plot. The article just dumbed it down.

Intel changing naming scheme.....

[vwjeff]

Intel is changing their naming scheme soon. You can find the article at:

http://news.com.com/2100-1006-5174895.html

Intel was forced into this due to the many variations of a chip with the same clock speed. It's also a good way for them to explain why their Pentium-m is faster than the Pentium 4-m.

Other Reviews

[breakinbearx]

As covered by arstechnica, there are also reviews at [H]ardOCP, Hexus, HotHardware.com, Sudhian, and The Tech Report. AMD's official announcement is here.

Re:Virus protection on the chip?

[afidel]

Well since every other major architecture except IA-32 has NOEXEC or similar I would imagine that every Free OS has such code already, it might need to be ported and cleaned up but most of the work should already be done. Also XP SP2 should have it later this year.

Re:Waiting

[Anonymous Coward]

There are times to wait for the next best thing...

AMD's 754 and 940 will be replaced by 939s (I think). If you don't think you will ever want to upgrade this CPU, it doesn't matter what you choose. I think the 939s are dual channel though (754 is single).

BUT... as for current AMD motherboards, PCI Express isn't around and is a _MUST_ at this point. PCI Express will be taking over from this point forward. This means future video cards _may not_ be available for AGP setups. I bet the higher end cards won't be at all.

I haven't upgraded a CPU in any computer I have, but I have upgraded vid cards. I am sure AMD boards will have PCI Express soon. If you are thinking of buying, let this be your reason to hold off.

Duel Opterons

[BrookHarty]

Been wanting to go back to a true Dual system, (my last was a Dual P3-800, My Dual P2-400 is my Linux box) Keeping an eye out on prices for a new modern Dual system compared to a fast AMD FX.

You can pick up a Dual AMD-2800 for about 500 bux for a barebones cpu's+mb+case (also uses PC2100 ram). Opterons for dual systems are ridiculously priced, 248's are about 900 bux each, and motherboard for 300, so about 2500 dollars for a basic barebones system. Dual Xeon 3.2's with 1meg cache are about the same price, but xeon motherboards are less "workstation" friendly, and more expensive. ( PCI-64 slots, etc)

Also with PCI-X gfx cards about to be released, a bunch of new motherboards will come out. And It looks like Socket 940 is going to be phased out later this year for Socket 939, so a FX buy might be a locked in purchase, with no upgrades. Which the Opteron uses 940, so I'm a little confused about the Opteron's upgrade path.

Hoping if I want 6 months, the prices for Opterons will be down enough to build a basic dual system, with PCIExpress, and at least 2+ ghz CPU's. Something that will be fast as an FX in gaming, but also have the dual cpu smoothness feel with power of running virtual machines and crunch numbers well.

The Xeon line is cheaper, maybe some new motherboards might come out and bump it up to the system im thinking about.

Re:Duel Opterons

[Tumbleweed]

1) PCI-Express is what's coming, not PCI-X, which is something older. PCI-Express is mostly being abbreviated as PCI-E, from what I've seen.

2) Socket 940 isn't the one being phased out, Socket 754 is. Socket 940 is for Opterons & Athlon FXs. Athlon 64s are what use Socket 754, and that's the one being ditched for Socket 939. Once Socket 939 is available, Athlon FXs will also be made available in that socket form factor. Socket 939 & the new Athlon FXs will also enable you to use NON-registered memory, which will be less expensive, though you won't be able to use as much of it.

Re:Flash for Graphs?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been discussed a thousand times. Here goes one more...

Anandtech gets revenue from advertisements. These advertisements are in flash. If you don't have flash enabled, then Anandtech does not get paid for that advertisement. Therefore Anandtech makes sure the information of value is also in flash, to ensure that they are compensated for your viewing of their material.

So please, when you find that cluestick - make sure to give yourself a good whack with it.

FX-53 tested against 16 other processors

[EconolineCrush]

Tech Report's review tests the FX-53 against a total of sixteen other chips. Good reading if you've got a benchmark fetish, too.

Re:Flash for Graphs?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hooray for Flash Click to View!

Re:Pardon me...

[CoreDump01]

That's why i love flashblock for Mozilla / Fire*

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

It lets you select exactly which flash banner / whatever on a site is displayed.
This is a must-have IMO

Re:Virus protection on the chip?

[runderwo]

Actually, the new capability is to set execute permissions on a per-page basis in hardware. IA-32 already had an execute permission bit on segments. No 32-bit IA-32 OS that I know of uses a segmented model though, preferring a flat memory model, which means we only get read and write permissions in hardware.

Thanks to this minor oversight in the design of IA-32, we have gone a long time without the benefit of hardware execute protection. There are software kludges that try to work around this (like working around the 386 bug with page write protection), but a hardware solution will be more robust and speedy.