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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.
Probably the best place to look for info:w s&file=article&sid=3165&mode=thread&order=0&thold= 0
http://amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Ne
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Toms Hardware Review
Coral Cache: http://www.hexus.net.nyud.net:8090/content/reviews /review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xMzE3
http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review_print. php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xMzE3
This is filler. This is more filler. This is even more filler. This is a rant about the captcha.
-theGreater.
I know I can't wait to do spreadsheets in 2.8Ghz, 64-bit glory. >_> That aside, this is still a pretty awesome development.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
I stopped caring about CPU advances when the Pentium II reached 233 MHz. I run Windows 98 on my machine wihtout a firewall and I have never had a problem with spyware or viruses. How about we focus research and development on somehting more important, like fuel cells to power my wireless mouse.
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've been looking to upgrade (just buying a new mb/cpu/ram combo), but which processor is which out of MANCHESTER, CLAWHAMMER, SAND DIEGO, VENICE, and WINCHESTER??
C:\>
Will a beowulf cluster of these run OSX?
(I honestly can't tell if I'm being +5 funny or -1 troll some days...)
What is 1 MiB of L2 cache? 1 Million Bytes?
It's the binary count of bytes, 2^n, instead of the decimal *10^n
Let the commencement BEGINULATE!
SI unit for 1 megabyte (1024) is MiB, 1 megabyte (1000) is MB.
SI units were changed back in the 90s to reflect base-10, the base-2 units were renamed to use the letter 'i'.
For a definition of MiB see this wikipedia article -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte
n 64/fx57/001.htm
And here is a random review that includes the actual cache numbers -- http://www.gdhardware.com/hardware/cpus/amd/athlo
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.
AMD only have about 15% of the market after beating Intel numerious of time tell you how smart the general public are.
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?
Did you see the power requirements? 104W for a single core? I really can't imagine Apple preferring this to a Pentium-M derivative.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The reason it costs so much is you just outfitted your rig with some seriously serious hardware. You went close to top of the line of your own volition. The top-shelf stuff will always cost you a premium - one that doesn't usually scale to the increase in performance - because you're going for best of the best.
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.
Programs in the system tray are mainly memory hogs, not processor time consuming. After all those just sit there and wait for something to happen. And interactive programs like chats just don't eat to much processor time either, the average amount of data to process is dwarfed by the amount the game engine is crunching.
I wonder if it fixes the 2T memory timings when using 4 sticks of ram. I really want 2 gigs of ram without loosing my current 1 gig.
I know, it's terrible isn't it? I just can't stand knowing that my system could potentially be running nearly 0.2% faster under certain, very specific, workloads.
Pull up task manager and look at how much CPU usage you have when your machine is just sitting 'idle', not running a game or other CPU intensive app. If you have a higher end CPU, it's probably maybe averaging 1-2%. That's not a lot of stuff to toss on the other CPU. The FX chip will run at much more than 2% faster than the dual-core chips available now, so it's the better option for games (99.9% of which won't take advantage of 2 CPUs). In a couple years when more games are written for SMP systems, then the dual-core will be the way to go.
what else can you buy for $1031
Well... you've got yourself a good start on a great book collection.
All the FX chips are Socket 939. The only chips that are socket 940 are Opterons. The Athlon-FX chips are basically Socket 939 Opterons.
Socket 939 is for the single CPU systems (including multiple cores).
Socket 940 is for multiple CPU systems (ie. Opteron).
The ratio of people to cake is too big
MB: Megabyte (1000*1000=10^6 bytes)
MiB: Mebibyte (1024*1024=2^20 bytes)
theefer
The memory controller has also been tweaked to support mismatched memory module sizes - something some enthusiasts have been crying out for
I wonder how AMD was able to translate fanboi-talk from
Wah Wah! Make it faster! Make it faster!
to
Please tweak your memory controller to support mismatched memory module sizes...
It boggles the mind!
Regardless of who it's aimed at, this would benefit those of us trying to run multiple apps such as Photoshop, email, web, various centralized management apps, vmware, etc, many of which are vying for CPU time. You know, those of us that are trying to do something productive with our time?
Ernie
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
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
Also, the 940 boards have to be 6-layer (costs more), and they have to have ECC (IIRC), whereas 939 can be 4-layer, and use cheaper, faster non-ECC memory.
Here's all of the current sockets that AMD uses:
462: Newer Classic Athlons, Athlon MPs (server chip), Athlon XPs, Duron, Old Semprons
754: Old Athlon 64s, Semprons, Turion 64s (mobile chip)
939: Newer Athlon 64s, most Athlon 64 FX's (53, 55, 57), and in the near future, newer Semprons and 1xx (single CPU only) Opterons
940: Opterons, Athlon 64 FX-51 and some FX-53s
Then Intel will need two bolt of lightning.
I'm not exactly an Apple Fan boi. I understand that they have their flaws etc but the move to x86 still doesn't fit right in my head and this news just crystalizes it for me.
In the past, we could all group around the fact that it was impossible to really tell if PPC was actually any good when compared to x86. We knew games sucked, but were confident in the fact that the desktop apps we owned 'felt snappier' and that we were more productive as a result. Now we're being told that actually x86 is probably about as good as PPC, and in the future it will be better. Thats fine. As long as I'm running on the best hardware for my Mac and I don't have to start waiting for the x86 version of my favourite apps to become available I don't care. But the problem is that we all know that Intel isn't the best at making x86 chips. So when I buy my 'Intel inside' Mac, I'm going to know that Joe 'AMD' Linux, with his fancy new 128bit, 1024 core, $15 AMD can, and will, actually toast my Mac, no questions asked, with verifiable benchmarks to prove it and I'm powerless to do anything about it without breaking the EULA. That sucks.
Bottom line: Apples hardware should be the best platform to run OS X. If that means using AMD, I want AMD in my Mac - and at the moment boy do I want one of those suckers in my Mac!
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
The original FXs were 940s, However, the newer ones have been 939 (they might also have a 940, but I don't believe so.)
Also, it's not just one pin removed, the actual layout is different between 939 and 940. (940 also supports smp, that being the main difference.)
The big difference between 754 and 939/940 is that 939/940 support dual-channel memory. This is important, because if they didn't, while the athlon 64 is relatively non-memory bandwidth hungry (as compared to the p4), performance would suffer with two cores on single channel memory.
Well, here's another review:
:-))
tweakers.net
It's in Dutch but it has some nice benchmarkresults which should be clear to anybody, benchmarked next to an AMD dual-core 4200+ and a AMD 3800+ (and I know for a fact those results are correct cause it's all been benchmarked on my own desk
Check it out. Anandtech has a review as well.
AMD has limited production facilities. These "fabs" produce all of their semiconductor products. The FX57 is currently the fastest chip they produce, and typically yields on faster processors are lower than slower chips. AMD already has commitments to clients to supply certain quantities of slower chips as well. Additionally AMD doesn't want to devalue their slower processors by flooding the market with the fastest chips. These factors all boil down to the single fact that AMD can only produce a limited number of FX57 processors.
The basic laws of supply and demand dictate that there is an inverse relationship between price and demand. If we assume that AMD has a fixed supply then their goal is to set a price that will match demand to supply as closely as possible. If the price is too high then some of their chips will go unsold, and AMD will either have to stockpile or cut the price. If the price is too low then AMD will lose profit and have a backlog of buyers.