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AMD Athlon 64 6000+ Launched And Tested
Spinnerbait writes "AMD officially launched their next speed bump in the Athlon 64 product line,
in the form of
a new 3GHz part branded the Athlon 64 6000+. This new dual-core Athlon
64 sports 1MB of on-chip cache per core and is designed for AMD's Socket AM2
platform. This chip is still built on AMD's 90nm fab node and is comprised
of some 227 million transistors. It also carries a thermal power profile
of about 125Watts. Unfortunately, in all the
benchmarks seen here, it was still unable to catch Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700
chip at 2.66GHz."
What is the point of releasing a new iteration of an existing platform to bump up speed and still not catch up with the competitions products?
Wouldn't they have been better served re-routing this R&D effort/money into something which would put them back on top of either the price or performance curves?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
"Unfortunately, in all the benchmarks seen here, it was still unable to catch Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700 chip at 2.66GHz."
What's unfortunate about it? It's just a fact.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
From TFA: The OS used was Windows XP Pro SP2.
A 32 bit OS. The real strength of the AMD 64 architecture is running in 64 bit mode - benchmarking this chip compared to other 64 bit architectures would be far more helpful than running a 32bit Sandra tests and Photoshop tests on it.
Not a very helpful benchmark. I'd like to see these chips compared running 64 bit OS's - and compare the speed and throughput of applications like Apache, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, PHP / Perl scripting, and raw image processing - not Photoshop, where most of the time is spent waiting on the user to do something.
AMD has been skimping lately on its cache. I have a sneaking suspicion that the majority of AMD's current performance issues are related to cache and lack thereof.
The Intel chips carry 4 to 8 Mb of cache. The thing about the Intel architecture is that the cache is shared across both or all 4 cores. In contrast the AMD chips have a dedicated *tiny* 1 MB cache for the consumer chips and 2mb per core on the high-end parts.
With that said, the reality of dual core computing is that one core is used much more heavily than the other. In Intel's case this means that one core is basically given the entire cache for its use - a significant performance boost when running a few tasks. In AMD's case the idle cache is inaccessible to the heavily loaded core.
The reason that makes me think that the cache is the current bottleneck is that the memory controller on the AMD chip is significantly faster than Intel's. Given that fact one would conclude that in non disk-bound applications that require large amounts of memory (games) the AMD chips would pull ahead. This is not the case. Of course there is more than just cache at play here but the fact that the Intel chips has 4 to 8 times more cache available to it has to make a fairly significant difference.
Check out my AMD FX-70 at http://amd4x4.blogspot.com/
The percentage of chips able to run at a given frequency rises as they tweak the process to make manufacturing more efficient. This is not a new factory, process or design. They make them already. Why not sell them?
Why exactly do you find that the given benchmarks are not useful?
Because the vast majority of corporate desktops are not running 3D applications, and corporate servers are more performance critical than what corporate desktops are.
Do you think that we should care about how the chip could possibly perform in a scenario that accounts for a tiny proportion of all real use(your 64-bit suggestion)
Nice troll attempt. The majority of corporate desktops are not running 3D applications, so the Sandra and 3DMark benchmarks are irrelevant, and I agree with the Grandparent post. I too would like to see a true 64bit benchmark, but also add in mail and file servers to the databases and web servers that grandparent poster mentioned. Hell, if you want to get really fancy, benchmark J2EE performance on the boxes, too.
or that perhaps we should care about the use that these chips will see the vast majority of the time(32-bit apps on a 32-bit OS)?
Try telling that to the IT director that has to maintain a system that will handle corporate email for over 5000 users - and do it quickly, while running SAP, internal J2EE apps, and other corporate applications.
With that kind of volume, the increased throughput of the 64 bit architecture becomes very compelling.
I think somehow that the latter is more useful.
Only to you. Meanwhile, adults have more important things to do than squeeze out another 3 frames per second on Call of Duty.
You're missing a huge point. Every day that they're not making anything is a day of paying 1000s of wages, taxes, utilities and interest on the loans they take out to pay for the equipment. It's cheaper to make something, anything, that you can sell [and earn some low hanging customers] than so sit around doing nothing.
Think about it, you have a pile of costs that don't go away. You can't just lay off/rehire fab technicians on a whim. These costs don't just go away because demand for Opterons is lower one week compared to last.
They DO NOT make the low end processors to profit. Quite the contrary, they barely break even [if not lose money] on the deal in terms of per unit cost. Aside from re-couping some cost, they also earn business from customers who can only afford the $50 processor (which in all likelyhood is all they really need anyways). Many customers who start on the low end processors come back for another, or better yet, a higher end processor down the road.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.