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.

Comments

Re:Apple's "Intel-Macs" will shortly go AMD

[TheRaven64]

Did you see the power requirements? 104W for a single core? I really can't imagine Apple preferring this to a Pentium-M derivative.

Re:Ugh

[nitehorse]

Well, that's what you get for not researching properly before buying things. :)

So, there are three socket types for AMD64 CPUs. The low-end stuff is Socket 754 - Sempron and Athlon64 and such. S754 is basically a dead end.

Socket 939 is a much more promising long-term socket for Athlon64 upgrades. Most new S939 boards these days are being made with PCIe, which dovetails nicely with the fact that the high-end graphics card vendors are all moving PCIe as well.

Socket 940 is for Opterons and Athlon64-FX chips. The FX chips are really expensive and really fast, but more expensive than fast when compared to their S939 brethren. Socket 940 boards come in both AGP and PCIe variants (since S940 is relatively old and predates PCIe, many AGP S940 boards exist).

As far as I know, there aren't any plans for dual-core chips on the S754 chipsets. However, the Athlon64-x2 chips are S939, and the dual-core Opterons are all S940. If you have an S939 board, it's probably smarter to forget the FX chips and go straight for an A64-x2 once they become a bit more affordable.

Re:To think...

[bill_mcgonigle]

AMD has long been catering to the enthusiast market which is a very, very small fraction of the overall market

That's OK as an R&D goal - an enthusiast machine 5 years ago was a 800MHz P3, barely enough to get XP & Office running today.

If you get your performance out for the enthusiast, next year you can get it into your consumer line, then the year after figure out how to run it in a laptop. At least, traditionally that's how it's done - Intel seems to be kicking ass in the laptop line and bring it up to the desktop - wise from a watts/$/flop perspective. Of course you can argue that was just about the Intel Marketing Department getting hold of R&D for a few years and screwing things up so badly that they're back to the P3 track and Marketing didn't notice what the blokes in Israel were up to.