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AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core Chips Released
HaloPhreak writes "InformationWeek reports today that AMD has released the Athlon 64 X2 for the high end desktop. Intel and AMD have been competing to get these out as soon as possible, but I think it will be interesting to see what AMD will do with the mobile version of this processor, due out in 2006." From the article: "Both companies have been in a tight race to deliver the processors since engineers realized that simply ratcheting up the clock speed of single-core chips was creating too much heat and not producing the same improvements seen in previous models."
Apparantly so, but geek.com says:
"AMD could be positioning itself as the "good guy" in this whole scenario by allowing users to optionally disregard DRM. I would suspect this would be something like Intel's serial number scheme, except that AMD will most likely leave it off by default and would require enabling it via the motherboard BIOS setup or something similar."
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Yes, I believe they are standard Athlon 64 socket-types (939). Pretty much any motherboard will be able to support them with nothing more than a BIOS upgrade (if that)
-Jesse
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If anyone needs to be refreshed on how badass these chips are:
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http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
Intel must be embarrassed
AMD's low end goes for $537 which is almost identical to the Pentium at $530 it actually outperforms. The high end goes for $1001 which is almost identical to the PDEE which goes for $999. And guess what, it outperforms that. Intel has a lower starting point and AMD doesn't match it, THAT is true, but if you actually compare the chips like for like it's obvious to even a brain dead monkey that X2s come at the same price points as the PDs and to anyone who thinks of looking at benchmarks, the X2s easily out perform them.
How are X2's twice the price, I thought people understood the whole Mhz thing now...
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Nope, they also don't understand that AMDs onboard memory controls where designed for this type of application. The AMD X2 chips are a very efficent design.. The intel Design has many week points and seems rushed.
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The problem is that you are comparing a 2.8Ghz P4 to a 2.2Ghz Athlon64... which is completely off.
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Note the graphs over here: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
See how the 3200+ running at "just" 2Ghz is outperforming even a 3.4Ghz P4 and sometimes even a 3.5 or 3.6Ghz P4.
Also look at how a 2.8Ghz P4 isn't even on the charts... use your brain and extrapolate from the P4's what the 2.8Ghz P4 would be posting and you can see that it is WAY slower than even a 2Ghz Athlon64.
Now let's talk about what was in this article.
They told us that the lowest end Athlon64X2 is clocked at 2.2Ghz (the same as a 3500+ and faster than the 2Ghz chip in my above examples) and comes in at $537. The lowest end PentiumD is clocked at 2.8Ghz and comes in at $241.
At first glance it looks like the A64X2 is double the price... but then look at the highest end PentiumD at 3.2Ghz it's priced at $530.
Ok... use your brain again and realize that the 2Ghz A64 was outperforming a 3.4Ghz P4 and it's easy to see that the A64X2 at 2.2Ghz priced the SAME as a 3.2Ghz PD means that the A64 is actually the LOWER priced part.
The difference here is that AMD chose to focus on the high end. They didn't play "low-ball" with Intel because they don't have to. Their cheap single core chips will wipe the plate with the low-ball PD and will be cheaper as well... while their A64X2 is there AT THE SAME PRICE POINT to compete with the high end PD.
In summary... they are priced competitively.
I hope all that made sense.
Friedmud
The Opteron 939 and 940 sockets and pinouts where designed for dual core to begin with so the upgrade is fairly smooth. The pinout change doesn't come until the Quad core processors are released sometime next year.
Yes, but if you analyze performances, you'll see that an idle OS has a CPU running the "idle thread" for 99% of its time.
It would appear that the BIOS writers don't get this 64-bit thing. I picked up four 1G sticks of DDR 400 'value' RAM all at once rather than deal with mismatched venders later on. A painful step - about an extra $160 more than I planned to pay - but 2G of RAM is comes up a bit short when working with VMWare images that are running app servers. Besides, why not?
Had I not waited for an extra three months for a revision 'e' CPU that fixes the issues using all four memory slots, I might just be a bit bitter. Nothing on any of the forms warned me that 'supported 4G of RAM' actually translates into posting - not that you can actually access 3.4G in Win2k and 3.25G in Win2003-x64. Yup, sure enough, the 64-bit version of Windows system properties thinks it has even less memory then the 32-bit original. Task manager both report the same amount as the BIOS, however.
So, for all of those thinking this might make for a spiffy way to update an aging dual CPU rig, be warned about the RAM limitations. When DFI said 'supports 4G of RAM', they mean it will post...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
My 3000+ is at 35C right now. Room temperature (not case temperature) is 28C. You want cooler than that ?
A dual core 1.6 at $200.
Right now, you can get a single core Athlon 64 3200 for $200.
Considering that said processor is 2x faster (clock wise) than your dual core solution, and that dual cores are not necessarily 2x faster than whatever speed they are rated for, I would say that it would not be very smart for you to even buy such a chip, let alone AMD manufacture one.
The HP Pavillion zv6000 and Compaq R4000 notebooks use Socket 939 desktop CPUs with their aluminum lid removed. They've been shipping with the old 130nm core, all the way up to 4000+. In theory there's no reason you couldn't swap in a X2, so long as the BIOS supports it, although if you read the service manual they made it much more difficult to swap CPUs than they did on the zv5000z/R3000z series. Best to wait for HP to sell them with that option.
Too bad HP didn't include a card slot to upgrade from the onboard Radeon 200M video. Even with the 128MB dedicated RAM option (which all the retail models I've seen come with) it's too weak for serious gaming, which is pretty retarted for a desktop-replacement behemoth with the best gaming CPU on the planet. They also managed to break dual channel memory support, so sticking with the 3500+/3800+/etc ratings is a little misleading (subtract 100 to get the correct single-channel rating). That said, they're very inexpensive so you get an awful lot for your money.
Turion dual cores wait until next year. Meanwhile, this single-core Turion notebook looks very tempting, for those of us who can't quite afford a Ferarri.
I have an Athlon 1800+ with 512mb. I'm running, right now:
- XFCE 4.2 with 4 desktops
- Opera 7.54u2 with about 15 tabs
- Beep Media player
- Gaim, 4 accounts
- aMule
- Several console sessions and GVIM windows
- Assorted sevices (Samba, SSHd, Apache, etc)
- GKrellm2
The system is consistently responsive and snappy, and Gkrellm reports 305Mb free (without swap pages), with 0% of the swap partition used. I know FF is quite more memory hungry than Opera, but still, there's no need for 1Gb of memory to run a desktop comfortably.