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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."
on Extremetech
Why should Anand get all the attention?
Feel free to also check http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njc1
another review on tom's hardware
h tm l
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041019/index.
Ignorance is the Agent of Fear; Fear Is the Agent of Violence - >1
This is actually the last resort, as the cost of wafer real-estate versus speed increase is low. You rarely do this for raw speed rather for special needs like Servers and the like.
The increase in the speed for a workstation is probably one speed grade at a cost increase of 30% or so.
There is two good articles over on TheInquirer about Intels road map and why they have to go the Increase the cache route for 2005. Worth a read. Part One and Part Two
Help fight continental drift.
This is a major overhaul of the aging nforce3 chipset.. Check it out.
Expect a flurry of new advances by the end of the year.
I am ready to buy a new Linux system and am pulling hair out trying to make the best choice. Due to Linux compatibility issues (and mixed experiences with nforce2), I cannot really consider nforce4 so it will be Via for me. Though Nvidia will likely get the nod for graphics.
The 90nm chips are a mixed bag at the moment.
clock speed isn't the only way to do more work in less time, and get better balance with the current bottlenecks getting to memory & i/o -- time for some new architectures, instead of the same old stuff with smaller transistors and higher clock speeds
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.
http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?articl
http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/athlon64-fx5
http://www.bit-tech.net/review/364/
http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=266
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=
http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?id=331
http://www.amdreview.com/reviews.php?rev=fx-55-40
http://www.techwarelabs.com/reviews/processors/am
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njc1
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athl
http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=614
if you're going to stand your ground with wintel and attack reviews from tomshardware & co. then i have to ask what you take issue with.
did you disagree with the test system?
the benchmarks used?
i've read tomshardware for years and have found them objective and informative. While their results disagree with your emotion you shouldn't make baseless remarks
"The more you know, the less sure you are." - Voltaire
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.
Free Desk
"AnandTech and Tom's Hardware are so AMD-biased"
Given the current political climate there seems to be a lot of ignorance over the difference between "bias" and "fact". Indeed often people confuse a lack of bias with a counter bias.
For instance, if indeed AMD is the superior consumer chip, perhaps offering measurably better performance/value, then it is entirely reasonable that a site would say such, and it isn't a "bias" to pronounce the AMD the superior choice of the current candidates. Similarly if George W. Bush dines on kittens for dinner, and someone reports it, that doesn't mean that they are biased against Bush.
AnandTech and Tom's Hardware are so AMD-biased, I don't even bother reading them any more, especialy when it's related to the latest AMD or Intel chips.
Oh please, without any evidence or even anecdotes to back this up you're just making yourself sound like yet another disgruntled fanboy when reviews aren't going your way.
Almost all hardware sites agree that at the present, not only are AMD's chips providing the best performance, they also provide the most bang for the buck. That now even goes for media encoding, an area previously dominated by Intel. Who knows, no doubt the see-saw will swing back in Intel's favour in the future, but now it's clear that AMD will hold the lead throughout 2005.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
The 4000+ isn't clocked any higher than the 3800+, it's just got a bigger cache. It's basically an FX-53; in fact, that's exactly what it is, sans the name. It would seem AMD is plateauing as well, but perhaps 90nm will get them out of the jam later on.
However, this is a wise move by AMD even if the rating isn't justified (hint: the benchmarks say it's not). Intel will never have a 4GHz CPU, and idiots who don't understand performance will see the 4000+ and want it because it breaks the 4000 barrier. It could backfire, but probably not, because even though 4000+ isn't justified, it's still faster than any of Intel's chips on 90% of applications.
-Dan
Indeed. AMD's designs didn't scale as well speed-wise, so they had to get more creative to get better performance out of their chips. Improving their branch prediction, boosting FPU speeds, enlarging the cache, and improving the data bus were all methods that Intel would go back to from time to time, but usually with some reluctance.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
With Intel having recently backed off on the effort to push clock rates ever higher, is there a plateau in sight for AMD?
There's some information to be realized:
AMD uses IBM's Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology. This reduces power consumption by a very large degree. It is rumored that Intel tried to license the technology but, IBM and their fondness for cross-licensing, wanted too much (probably an x86 license). So Intel has been pushing out chips with standard silicon fabrication techniques at the expense of tremendous power consumption.
My guess is that Intel is coming up with a "massively parallel" architecture that can be applied to mainframes all the way down to handhelds simply by reducing the number of cores on a chip. The cores, will probably be very small and flexible. A mainframe might have a few thousand while a handheld might have a few dozen. They've certainly been hinting at a change in architecture for some time.
And then there was the "Windows Elements" that was supposed to come out with the P5. I'm not sure why that didn't get more press. I'm guessing that it is a version of Windows that will run in local storage on these processors (i.e. - the processor will have enough on-chip storage to hold "Windows Elements").
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
all these accusations of Tom's Hardware being AMD biased makes me laugh. Just be happy for once we dont have to moan about Intel biased websites anymore ;)
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.
All of the energy going into the processor is going to come out as heat. It's similar to what would happen if you put a lightbulb in a box, and then measured how much heat was being produced outside.
Some of the power going to the lightbulb makes waste heat directly, and some of it makes light. But since it's all closed up in a box, all of the light ends up making heat, too.
So yes, some of the power going into the processor does useful work. But from the point of view outside the processor at the heatsink, even the useful work creates heat.