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AMD's Dual-core Athlon 64 X2 reviewed
ChocolateJesus writes "Weeks after formally announcing its dual-core Athlon X2 desktop processor, reviews are finally trickling out. The Tech Report's coverage tests two flavors of the Athlon 64 X2 against a whopping 17 competitors, including AMD and Intel's fastest single- and dual-core offerings. They've even thrown in a handful of dual-processor systems (and dual-core, dual-processor systems) for good measure. Testing focuses on multi-threaded applications, and the X2s deliver remarkable performance. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that unlike Intel's dual-core Pentiums, AMD's X2s consume no more power than single-core chips." Looks like this story has come out of embargo - if you've find more reviews, post them in comments.
Here's Anandtech's review of the X2.
No actually, they're going to be launched in June. The fact that this would be lost on the submitter was so obvious, I was able to prepare this message in advance and just paste it in.
These look to be amazing CPUs. After the initial linpack-with-large-matrices benchmark, you have to go thirteen pages into the benchmarks at TechReport to find some of note where the Intel solutions are able to score off a win!
Or you can jump right to their conclusions.
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Specific design and use of a modified version of the most recent AMD core (Venice). Venice's consumption is much lower than it's parent (Winchester core), check the graphs, Dual Cores' power consumption is a bit higher than the 3800+ Venice processor.
On top of that, A64 platforms are known for their low power consumption compared to Netburst based processors.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Over at Anandtech, they have a similar article up.
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http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
On that page they compare a 130nm single core Athlon to a 90nm dual core. Even under a full load, the 90nm dual core uses less power than the single core 130nm chip.
A dual CPU machine provides such a smooth operating environemnt. Never hiccups or pauses. I'm hooked on them. I hope dual core provides the same interactivity.
And a singlethreaded badly written application will be less prone to lock your computer, too, since the other apps will still be able to run from the second core.
The main issue is not the multithreading abilities of the applications, but the multithreading abilities of the OS itself. If the OS handles multithreading well, multicore (physical or virtual) will always give a slight to impressive improvement over single core.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
The best example of what you're looking at that i've found is at http://www23.tomshardware.com/index.html
It's an interactive chart of all major processors available now and plenty that aren't available, it's a good idea to compare what you might have not and what an upgrade could do for you.
Sorry about our server's inability to keep up right now. We have a mirror here: http://www2.techreport.com/
s/always/recently/
Clearly, you've just not been around very long, or not paying attention, or have only short-term memory.
It's only been in recent years that AMD has bested Intel, performance-wise. For many, many years, AMD could release a new chip with good performance similar and then Intel would beat them with another new chip.
There's a long, long history of AMD selling their chips at approximately half the price. Certainly through all of the 90's (486, pentium 1/2/3), AMD chips were substantially cheaper than buying Intel.
During much of this time, AMD's chips also had a strong reputation to run very hot. Intel had a reputation for running cool and being easy to overclock. It was Intel that introduced the multiplier locks to prevent overclocking, which apparantly became quite a problem outside the USA where unscrupulous companies would sand down the tops of the chips (back then they were usually ceramic on top) and print a faster speed and resell them as such.
It wasn't even all that long ago when the infamous celeron 300A, which was multiplier locked, could overclock to 450 MHz (then, nearly the fastest chip they sold) by overclocking the front side bus by 50%. At the time, AMD's chips were far behind, and they were running hot with very little overclocking margin, just to try closing the substantial perforance gap.
Even back in the early Pentium days, even before AMD came out with a comperable chip, the 90 MHz pentium appeared in a new, smaller geometry process that made it run about as cool as the 486 66's.
Intel has indeed been in the lead, technologically, for a very long time... ever since they stopped licensing IP from Intel. For a bit of really ancient history, long ago, some large well known companies had a strong policy of never using any components that were not available from a second source. AMD's business model 20+ years ago was to license designs and be that second source.
Even a number of articles mention how the tables have turned recently, and speculate whether Intel will regain the honor of top performance.
I'm not affiliated with Intel, and in fact the PC I'm using to write this comment runs an AMD chip. When I upgrade, it'll probably be AMD again. Recently, AMD appears to have made some really smart architectual decisions that have put them in the lead, technology-wise.
But to believe such has always been the case, or even been a trend that's anything more than recent, is to ignore or be utterly ignorant of the very long history of Intel dominating the PC / x86 market with the best chips.
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