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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."
I had a conversation with a neophyte that was looking to "build their own computer" yesterday...He was obsessed with the idea that megahertz=performance...I tried to tell him that an FX-51, 52, or 53 would be a much better performer, all around, than any Pentium 4, "Extreme Gaming Edition" (as he put it) or not...but in the end, he was swayed by things like "Hyperthreading" and "Netburst"...AMD is having a hard time fighting against Megahurtz Madness and Buzzword Bufoonery.
What they probably mean is the chip has the capability to set segments of memory with a do not execute bit, for parts of memory such as the stack. That reduces the amount of things that a hacker can do if he finds a buffer overflow to exploit.
If you knew how the protection is done you woudlnt be so critical of it. The core of AMD's Enhanced Virus Protection is the a NX bit which specifies whether a page of memory is executable or not. This way, even if buffer overruns occur in that area of memory, it wouldnt be executed. I am not really sure how this is a bad thing.
My mom never taught me to sign.
The Cray-2 supercomputer was also liquid cooled. They used a fluid called flourinert which is electrically non-conductive but a good thermal conductor. Flourinert was origionally developed as an artificial plasma substitute for heart surgery. It is also insanely expensive, around $500/gallon!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Now who is going to have the first kernel which sets it all up properly to be secure? Linux? OpenBSD? FreeBSD? Or will it be that backward little company in Redmond who have major quality and security problems with everything they do?
That's just lame.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
The Quantum Computers I've seen use a gas in a pressurized chamber with lasers to "read" and "write" the quantum states of the gas molecules. (Yes pedants, I realize this is far oversimplified, but I'm making a simple observation here) There is your gas processor, I suppose.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Hope this isn't a RTFAC (C=Carefully), but I don't see in this article if they specify the tests were done with a 64 bit version of the OS and 64 bit binaries for the apps, or just a 32 bit versions.
/think/ it would make a big difference benchmark-wise.. correct me if I am wrong.
Maybe I'm missing it, but in the "OS" category, they only say "Windows XP Profession SP1", no reference that I can see if it's a 64 bit version of the OS or not. Ditto for the apps.
My understanding is (with the current state of affairs, 03/18/2004) if you run to the store and buy an AMD 64 machine, you'll get a 32 bit version of Windows and apps.
But you only get the benefits of eg. >2^32 ram access IF you run a 64 bit OS and 64 bit apps.
Being able to access >2^32 of ram in an app is really useful for 3D rendering of very large projects (a business I happen to associated with), so if the tests are done with 32 bit OS/Apps, the benchmarks would seem to be not so useful for that purpose.
Considering this is a 64 bit processor being evaluated, it would seem lacking not to mention this.
Most folks in 3D evaling AMD 64's are sticking 64 bit os's on there right away (Suse, Gentoo, Fedora/Yarrow, etc), and doing tests with that.
Am I missing the part where they talk about 32 vs. 64 bit OS in these tests? I would
ps. With all those blinking flashing (*!&@# banner adds, it's often hard to RTFAC. I wonder, do schools now give reading comprehension tests in rooms with flashing lights and spinning graphics to simulate 'real world' scenarios? >;)