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AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 Review

Posted by Zonk on from the heavy-hardware dept.

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."

4 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Great, but... by wbren · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From TFA:
    If you have tons of money to spend, and aren't attracted at all by the AthlonX2 then get this chip; however, at this point in the game we'd have a hard time giving a full recommendation to anyone to spend close to or over $1000 on a chip that isn't dual core.
    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
  2. AMD Reaping the benefits of HyperTransport by Peter+Amstutz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  3. Anyone else find the graphs confusing? by spitefowl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!

  4. market for high end products by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I realize the price will go down over time, but seriously, who is going to buy this chip?

    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.