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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."
Does this have built-in trusted computing/DRM technology like the newest Intel chips?
After all, I am strangely colored.
With it's lower power consuption than the Intel chips, and lower heat than expected from an AMD chip of this sort, it's definitely a reason to save up.
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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
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
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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Drop KDE/GNOME. They have both become too bloated for everyday use. There's a lot of excellent "lightweight" desktop enviroments and window managers: i reccomend XFCE (4.2.2). It's like Gnome after 6 months of workout and strict diet.
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.