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AMD Demos Dual-Core Athlon 64

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the with-two-types-of-salsa dept.

DigitumDei writes "Dual core chips came closer to reality as AMD demonstrated their Athlon64 dual-core offering. The 90nm technology chip will use the same 939-pin infrastructure and cooling solutions as the current Athlon 64 chips, meaning that upgrading to a dual-core chip from your current AMD64 will require little more than a BIOS update. Available in the second half of this year, the chip will be added to AMD's current line (Athlon64, Athlon FX, Sempron)."

4 of 428 comments (clear)

  1. Am I Missing Something? by Dragoon412 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't understand the hype about dual core CPUs.

    As I understand it, they work almost identically to a SMP setup, meaning they don't offer much of any performance benefit in most apps (particularly games). They draw more power, they run at higher temperatures, etc.

    Is there something I'm missing? Or is this whole dual-core mess really just SMP on one CPU? Because from what I've read on the likes of Extremetech, Anandtech, and so on, I'm not finding any reason to be impressed.

    1. Re:Am I Missing Something? by drwtsn32 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Sure, benchmarking a single app on an SMP system often makes little to no performance difference, but SMP is fantastic if you are a heavy multitasker and work with several apps at once.

      My first SMP system was a dual Pentium 133Mhz box. After that I never went back to a single proc... until the Pentium 4 came out. It's disappointing that this chip does not support SMP (except for the Xeon line). P4 hyperthreading helped bring back some SMP goodness, but it's still not as good as two real chips.

      Personally I can't wait for dual core CPUs!

  2. Why not two different clock speeds? by Gates82 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Rather than using two identical chips, is there any difficulty in putting say a 2.4 Ghz chip with a 500 Mhz one? I would love to have the latest and greatest chip for gaming, and crunching through video and then have a low powered second chip to play my mp3's and surf the web, while the high-end chip is crunching through numbers in the background. Guess that's why I have a laptop, play on that while the desktop is doing its thing.

    --
    So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's sister?

  3. I'm poor! by shamowfski · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does dual core mean dual price? With current fx-55's costing around a grand, what can we expect these to cost? 1,500-2,000? If AMD wants to remain competitive with Intel they are going to have to work on that. Who ever guessed AMD would be the one who had to lower prices to compete??