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AMD Launches Athlon 64 FX-57
Kez writes "Today AMD release what could be the fastest x86 processor to date. The FX-57 is the first 90nm Athlon 64 FX from AMD, clocked to 2.8GHz, with 1MiB of L2 cache and support for SSE3. The memory controller has also been tweaked to support mismatched memory module sizes - something some enthusiasts have been crying out for. Hexus.net reviews the new processor, which, in gaming benchmarks, walks all over any of Intel's offerings." There's going to be plenty of reviews I'm sure - if you've found other links, please post them below.
Because this processor is mainly aimed at the gaming community, and games often aren't multithreaded, so the second core would just be idle and convert electricity into heat.
Interestingly though once there was only one Athlon 64FX, and if a new one came out, its predecessor would then, if remaining on sale, be renamed. This time the old Athlon 64FX (55) remains on sale with the 64FX name.
I'm poor, yet I want to buy a new PC.
Therefore, if new CPUs come out, I can get an old one at a greatly reduced price.
I do hope I'll be able to afford a 64-bit CPU... otherwise my new computer will be even more outdated as soon as I buy it.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Those are all the core code names. San Diego and Venice are the two newest and best.
They are the best overclockers and produce the least heat. They use 90nm technology.
Venice is generally used in the lower lineup (3000+, 3200+, 3500+, etc) And San Diego is used with more expensive processors (4000+, FX-55)
Those other cores are older and should be avoided unless you want to save some money.
In a windows environment, even though your game might be a single thread, are there not also other programs running in the background? Wouldn't those other threads suck up some of the processor cycles?
I would think that having a dual core set up, the game can hog one processor while the rest of the OS and other threads can hog the other processor. When I play games, I leave my chat clients open and there's all the crap running in the system tray. All of that can be running on one processor, while the game could run on its own processor.
Are are you suggesting that its the added functionality of the processor and not how much processing time is available that makes the real difference?
It doesn't always go down. It only slows down until we tweak the max number of connections for the traffic that's coming in.
I'm not sure whether hexus.net aliases to somewhere else in your DNS or something, but our reviews are never 'pretty bad', even though I do say so myself. Maybe you're reading another site instead of ours?
Feel free to point out what you think we suck at though, incase we're missing something and you can help us fix it. Feedback is always welcome, even from Slashdotters.
- 'sup, G?
It is all about quantity. People seem to think that the more of something you get in a product, the better. This marketing rationale is used for other kinds of products. Just look at fastfood ('Gorge yourself on our 10lb. McGutBomb Burger!'), automobile ('Scale Mt Everest in your new 3000 horsepower Chevy Truck!') or computer ('You'll need a 3.4Ghz machine to run Word and send email!') advertising. We've become a society of 'More is always better'. I don't think efficiency and quality are not important to the general public anymore.
As hard disks get bigger, it gets more important, not less important.
1,048,576 vs 1,000,000 is 4.8% off
GiB vs GB = 7.3% off
TiB vs TB = 9.9% off
PiB vs PB = 12.5% off
EiB vs EB = 15.2% off
Anyway, it is important. How long until someone dies because some programmer mixed the two up?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The games might not be multithreaded, but the other core can run primary OS tasks. Plus, games will be, more and more, written to take advantage of those extra cores.
antipaucity