First Looks at Athlon 64 4000+ & FX-55

CrzyP writes "AnandTech.com has benchmarked the new "Athlon 64 4000+ and the FX-55" in various areas including business application performance, audio/video, gaming, and much more in this first look at AMD's newest 64bit chips. Just after AMD's announcement, AnandTech posted this article to help consumers choose between Intel and AMD."

Comments

Re:I wonder

[stone2020]

AMD will probably max out at 3 ghz with this technology, but then they will introduce dual core which should be around 5 ghz.

Power density

[lagartijo]

The power density at nm process (watts per square inch) has reached the nuclear reactors. See page 8. http://cnscenter.future.co.kr/resource/rsc-center/ presentation/intel/spring2003/S03USCQNS67_OS.pdf It's intel's but I assume it is the same for AMD.

Duh

[igzat]

I think the choice is clear regardless of this article. Intel announced last week that they are giving up a 4Ghz Pentium CPU, and even the 3.8 Ghz model is very scarce. Where as AMD's Athlon 3800+ can be easily found, With the announcement of the 4000+ CPU, AMD has a clear lead over intel, and will until the Dual-CPU wars begin sometime next year. I think now is a good time to own AMD stock. Their marketshare is going to slowly increase over the next 12 months. I'm not taking sides here, just stating the obvious.

Re:Like my boss said...

[Anonymous Coward]

really??

we lost a purchasing person at corperate because he bought intel.

we asked for some SGI workstations for a specific project. the nimrod decided he could save us $$$$thousands by buying Intel Based Dells instead.

He was fired.

Re:Impartial? hah.

[harrkev]

I certainly don't see that.

Well, in a way I do. They certainly are biased towards AMD, but only in the sense that AMD generally offers better value for the money, and is the only way to get 64 bits (right now). I bet if given the choice between a thousand dollars or a kick in the head, they would be biased toward the money ;)

All Intel has given us lately is a new extra-fragile socket, and PCI express (but good luck finding a PCI express vid card). In short, ho-hum. In a year or two, PCI express will be a good thing, but I will pass on it for right now.

Re:I wonder

[drinkypoo]

How about some new architectures with smaller transistors and higher clock speeds? :) I'd love to see, say, asynchronous logic, but I don't see it happening any time soon, at least in the main stream.

Re:I wonder

[tanveer1979]

Here's are ready reckoner

130nm process, max 1Ghz
90nm process max 2.5Gz
65nm process max 5Ghz

Currently 65nm process is not stable in itself. Of course you can go for a 35nm process too but yields(working chips) will be Unless the yields are greater then 70% it does not make sense. Moreover as you push nm, electrical effects become more and more pronounced. For example electro-migration, crosstalk etc., We currently do not have the precision to go to such low nm. The next step seems to be optical, but along with it probably a 40nm process will appear.

Power Consumption - how much is waste heat?

[Bryan Ischo]

This very thorough article also includes a comparison of power usage of the various processors during idle and busy states. The numbers look HUGE - the 90 nm Athlon 64 3500+ does the best at 86 watts at idle, with the Intel P4 560 (3.6 Ghz) doing the worst at 124 watts. While under a workload, the range is 114 watts to 210 watts.

At first I couldn't believe my eyes - how can heat sinks keep up with these figures? But then I realized that only some of that wattage is being converted to waste heat - some of it is actually doing the useful work of the processor.

Just curious - does anyone have any idea what the likely waste heat dissipation, in watts, would be for these processors, given the total power consumption figures in the article?

Re:Power Consumption - how much is waste heat?

[Bryan Ischo]

So basically, the amount of energy it takes to perform calculations is tiny? If processor A performs 2 billion arithmetic operations per second, and it is able to perform each operation just as efficiently as processor B which only performs 1 billion operations per second, the I would expect processor A to use twice as much energy performing its calculations as processor B.

But what you're saying is that the amount of energy being wasted as heat for both processors A and B is 99%, so the extra power used by processor A in its calculations won't be noticeable compared to processor B (assuming that the only extra power used by processor B is that used to perform calculations).

486s comsumed what, 10 - 20 watts? And they performed something like 1/100 or fewer as many arithmetic operations per second as today's processors? So they used 1/5 the power but performed 1/100 the amount of useful work. I guess that today's processors actually convert more of their input power to useful work (calculations) than processors of the past did.

Re:Power Consumption - how much is waste heat?

[nelsonal]

Almost all the power used in a processor ends up as heat because there arn't any moving parts (any that move flex and endup wasting energy as friction). There is a minute amount of power in a PC that goes to work (spinning drives and fans up and such) but usually this is considered negligable relative th the amount of power that generates heat. The assumption is that effectivly all power drawn is converted to heat through resistance (like a space heater). Calculations aren't work in the physical sense (application of force over time).

Re:Power Consumption - how much is waste heat?

[mczak]

you misinterpreted that power consumption graphs. This is total system power consumption, not only the cpu!
So if it says 100W, that is 100W measured at AC! Since psus are only 65-80% efficient, that means the system (without including psu loss) is only using 75W. If you keep in mind this includes hd, graphic card, mem, chipset,..., this doesn't leave that much for the cpu actually. Measuring system power also makes the differences in cpu power consumption look much smaller than it is in reality obviously.
And others have mentioned it already, ALL power is transformed to heat.

Re:I've just been out looking...

[NerveGas]

Your best bang for you buck is a good NForce2 motherboard, a mobile AthlonXP 2500+, and a Zalman 7000a cooler. All together, that will cost barely more than $200, and it's highly unlikely that you'd get less than 2.3 GHz out of the chip - with 2.5GHz not unheard of. Not at all bad for a $200 setup! The Athlon64 chips are, indeed, faster - but the marginal increase in speed can cost you quite a bit.

Of course, if you want more future-proofing, wait until a good board with PCI-E is available, which will mean A64. Even though the extra bandwidth of PCI-E isn't a big factor now, the way in which video cards are able to interface with memory and the CPU are mroe intelligent than with AGP, and most all cards are going to move to it. Shoot, the 6600-series cards are enough to make you wish you had PCI-E.

steve

Re:and tom's hardware

[Sivar]

Surprisingly, that review seemed to be unbiased and made few if any rediculous claims based on miniscule performance differences. If they keep this up, I might start reading them again.