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AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 Review
Duane writes "GDHardware.com has the first review of AMD's upcoming Athlon 64 FX-57 CPU clocked at 2.8GHz. They benchmark it against Intel's current fastest 3.8GHz P4 and the Athlon 64 X2." From the article: "Clocked at 2.8GHz, the FX-57 continues the 'San Diego' core AMD released with the FX-55, but is stepped up a paltry 200MHz faster. What's interesting is that while 200MHz on the Intel side of things doesn't always mean that great of a performance gain, not so with AMD."
I realize the price will go down over time, but seriously, who is going to buy this chip? Ok, I know some gamers with too much money on their hands will buy it, but it's still going to be surpassed when the dual cores start gaining ground, especially in gaming (think Christmas '05). Until I saw the pricetag I thought this might be an option for my next build, but not anymore. There are other options, at much lower prices.
-William Brendel
From what I've read, while Intel can keep cranking up the core speed of their chips, all those clock cycles are wasted if it spends most of its time waiting around for memory. The northbridge on Intel motherboards is now their biggest bottleneck. So at least part of the reason AMD can get better throughput at a lower clockrate is that it eliminates the northbridge altogether, puts the memory controller on the CPU, and ties everything else together using their insanely fast "HyperTransport" system bus. Any engineers who know more about it care to comment?
Some of them say "Lower is better" some of them say "FPS" some of them just don't say anything. It makes it hard to gauge if higher is better or lower is better. I mean, some things are obvious like 3dmark 2005 results, but then it says "4D rendering" what the heck is that? Is it measuring FPS?
Agh, eeh gads!
You're asking the wrong question. Even if no one buys this chip, the chip is still worthwhile to have on the market.
A few years ago Wendy's found that almost no one was buying their triple cheeseburgers, so they took triples off the menu. When they did this, they found that sales of their double cheeseburgers dropped to almost nothing. The problem, as they discovered later, was that the presence of triple cheeseburgers on the menu helped to legitimize the double cheeseburgers as mainstream items. Without triple cheeseburgers, the double cheeseburgers became the high end item and mainstream buyers went for the singles instead.
Since profit margins on double cheeseburgers are higher, the chain was forced to bring back triple cheeseburgers, even though triples weren't selling at all, because the sales of their double cheeseburgers depended on having triples on the menu.
Point is, although this is a fast food example, the same thing applies to the computer industry. You HAVE to have a high end item available if you are to have any hope of positioning the more profitable midrange items as mainstream.
Regardless of Intels memeory bandwidth advantage, this has rarely ever helped intel. They still get stomped over and over again in performance in just about every benchmark by Amd. And the hypertransport bus is why Amd's Duel Cores run so much faster than Intel's Duel cores. Intel has no chance of ever beating Amd's X2 Line. Intel must still use the standard fsb for intercommmunication between processors, further clogging an already overloaded bus. Not so with Amd.
My point was that Intel has not been behind AMD in memory bandwidth in recent memory. At most times, including right now, they are ahead of AMD in memory bandwidth. The parent (now super parent) poster was wrong in saying AMD was ahead.
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Intel reached the memory bandwidth levels AMD is at right now almost 3 years ago with the 3.0GHz/800FSB Pentium 4.
Being stuck with DDR isn't a problem as far as performance. But right now memory (esp. Taiwanese) vendors are dropping their prices on DDR2 trying to accelerate the switch to DDR2 from DDR. This is presumably to get out from under the license fees they pay to Rambus for DDR. But regardless of the reasons, as DDR2 drops in price below DDR, many Athlon users are going to wish they could use DDR2.
As to your comments that memory manufacturers say DDR2 prices aren't going to drop, I could find nothing like that at all. Most news sources say DDR2 prices will drop below DDR prices in the 2nd half of the year. More specific news says things like I mentioned above. http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050609_065
As fast as having your own onboard memory controller is, it does stifle innovation as far as what memory can be used on motherboards completely. So you had better be SURE your bet is right. I'm not 100% sure AMD's is.
I dunno about Intel copying AMD's plans. I haven't heard anything of it. To do so requires adding at least 160 pins to the CPU package. And it means you can't do multi-chip multi-processing.
As to your comments that this means that I/O traffic doesn't tie up the FSB, you are incorrect. When you do I/O, the data doesn't go directly to the CPU (into the CPU registers), it goes into RAM. And AMD has the memory controller on the CPU, so that means that when you are moving data from the disk to the RAM, the data on an AMD has to go into the CPU on the HT bus, and out on the FSB (RAM) pins. So I/Os still tie up the FSB.
On an Intel, the data never even goes to the CPU, it comes in the south bridge (ATA, including SATA, most other stuff) or directly into the north bridge (GigE), and then goes out on the RAM pins (the magic of DMA). So there's no more or less competition for memory bandwidth in an Intel than on an AMD.
Essentially, AMD just moved the northbridge into the CPU. Why this decreases the memory latency, I'm not sure. I'm not saying it doesn't either, as the numbers seem to indicate it does.
I dunno if Intel is going to copy AMD. Right now, Intel is busy moving the GPU onto the northbridge to save money (esp. in laptops). That means Intel probably isn't going to move the northbridge onto the CPU, at least not on all systems.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95