AMD's Socket 939, Athlon 64 FX-54 amd 64 3800+

BudKnight writes "It looks like AMD is launching four new desktop processors, a new core, and a new socket infrastructure today. HotHardware has tested AMD's two new flagship processors, the Athlon 64 FX-53 and the Athlon 64 3800+. The new FX-53 no longer needs registered memory to function and the 3800+ has only 512K of cache, but it gets an upgraded 128-bit memory controller. The usual suspects also have reviews posted as well - TechReport, Hard|OCP, Beyond3D - more are sure to follow."

Comments

No 64bit scores

[brejc8]

One silly thing about review sites comparing AMD64 to anything else is that they are still running them in 32bit mode. I found running in 64 bit mode gives you about 20% improvement in general code.
When running guile working on very long integer operations we got a _6_ times improvement. Our simulations dropped from taking an 66 minutes to just over 11 minutes.

Re:No 64bit scores

[brejc8]

Incase people are intrested here are the scores of scibench2 for a load of machines in our office.

Athlon64 3200 64: 523.70
Athlon XP2700: 467.15
Athlon64 3200 32: 449.07
Athlon XP2600: 448.42
Pentium4 3.0GHz: 387.57
Athlon 1400: 305.26
AMD Athlon 950: 209.51
Sparc 500MHz: 52.21
Sparc 440MHz: 51.89

Too long.

[Piranhaa]

It's a really good idea AMD is finally making the transition to dual-channel non buffered memory. They really should have done this a LOT sooner, before consumers started getting adjusted to the other socket, so they wouldn't have to replace their board when upgrading to the newer chip.

Re:Too long.

[swordboy]

so they wouldn't have to replace their board when upgrading to the newer chip.

Who still does this?

I've never upgraded without swapping both the processor and mobo. This isn't a troll but rather just curiosity - I'd like to know if there is any significant percentage of non-gamers that upgrade *only* the processor. I'dathunk that the "processor bottleneck" was just a myth.

I actually underclocked my Athlon 1800+ because it ran much cooler/lower power without any noticeable decrease in average usage habbits. Now, moving from a 5400rpm hard drive to a 7200rpm unit was a huge upgrade. I can't wait for cheap, desktop-oriented 10k and 15krpm units.

Sockets again

[tronicum]

I wonder how often they will introduce new sockets for just a bunch of CPUs.

939 will not support dual CPUs, after all that "Slot A", Socket 7xx/9xx nonsens you cant just buy a board and hope to upgrade the CPU. They change the memory systems, introduce new bus systems (graphic : PCI->AGP->PCI-X/PCI-Express).

Anyway I like my Athlon64 and at least the TDP (Thermal Design Power) of the new CPUs does not rise....

Tinfoil anyone?

[Gothmolly]

IANACD (I am not a CPU Designer), but I'd imagine that they're redesigning these things for a reason, NOT just to screw users and force an upgrade cycle. Intel did the same thing with their CPUs, and IBM/everyone did the same when they went from 30 pin to 72 pin SIMMS, then to DIMMS, then to DDR DIMMS. Was this all a vast Taiwanese component manufacturer conspiracy? I somehow doubt it. When it first came out, the PCI bus was limited to 3 slots due to physical 'ring' characteristics on the signal lines. Some propeller-heads at HP figured out a way to get 4 slots, and everyone ooh'd and aaah'd over it. Nowadays we have more slots due to bridge chips, are we going to complain that those pesky motherboard manufacturers keep updating their chipsets?
Are you also angry at the music industry cabal that forced everyone to upgrade from vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to DVD ?

Schernau's 2nd law: bolding part of your post actually detracts from your argument

Compile performance!

[IceFox]

Something I personally look for and most of the time isn't included in any reviews I was presently surprised to find in anandtech's review a Quake compile test!

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=2065&p =12

It doesn't specify what compiler or platform was used, but at the bare minimum it gives a little glimpse of what you might be able to achieve. Now all you have to do is apply that to a price/performance graph to determine what and how many you want to buy.

-Benjamin Meyer