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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."
Better served? Yes, of course. Possible in the short term? No!
Both manufacturers hurry out minor iterations of their existing processor set while readying the next generation; it's a stop-loss tactic, since they can pop something like this out in the engineering equivalent of an afternoon, and it masks the fact that they're falling behind. Rather like the Pentium IV QRSTTurboMach5's that were coming out almost weekly back when Athlon was pantsing Intel. Intel knew they sucked just as much as we did -- but not releasing them would have terminated their share price.
Besides -- your average Dell buyer only sees "New Release", not benchmarks.
"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
If you're an enthusiast with an existing AMD rig, why not just plop in a new CPU rather than a full Intel combo upgrade? If I was AM2 rather than 939, I myself would be down on this in a heartbeat. From the looks of things, overall it's about on par with Intel's bang-per-buck chips (E6600/E6700), sounds like a good move to me!
Realistically, there's so much transition going on right now, DX10 cards, new operating systems, multiple cores, I think it's best to let this storm even out for another 6-12 months before considering a full upgrade. So for now, plop in that new CPU or GPU, if need be, and have fun!
-Buddy of DoQ
It might not be the performance champ, but they've also priced it cheaper. So it provides options, and options are always a good thing.
-Laz
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.
Not only that but there are a lot of people with AM2 motherboards that might like to do a simple upgrade without buying a new motherboard. Not to mention that Dell, Gateway, and HP probably have a nice supply of AM2 motherboards and system that they can now sell with a faster CPU.
I am still ever hopeful to see what AMD does at 45nm.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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?
If I was AM2 rather than 939, I myself would be down on this in a heartbeat.
I also got a 939 rig, and I haven't quite understood the whole AM2 move from AMD. From what I've seen so far, AM2 doesn't bring a whole lot of improvements to the table, but what it does is equalize the upgrade costs between an AMD system and an Intel system. And in these days, that's hurting AMD bad I suspect.
If AMD needs some easy cash, why not release something for the 939 system? A reasonably priced, speedy dual core for instance? All I can get from my local shops is the X2 3800, which while dirt cheap, is the slowest X2. Why not sell the 4800 you had for not quite as little? I'd buy that as a intermediate upgrade.
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?
Uh, if you're behind, then it is even more imperative that you continue releasing parts that keep you competitive. If you were in 2nd place in a stock car race, would you refrain from pulling a tight inside turn because it would only close the gap with 1st, not actually allow you to overtake?
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?
"Better" implies either-or, which is incorrect. Obviously AMD knows they need to do something to try to get back on top, and have claimed they have that thing in the upcoming Barcelona chip. Designing such a thing takes years. So if they did 'either-or', they would have been working entirely on Barcelona for the past couple years, and in the meantime would have released zero incremental speed upgrades. Which would be disastrous for their competitive standings. So they do the obvious thing: Work on both. A design team works on the new chip, while the product development team works on squeezing more MHz out of the existing design.
Similarly, it isn't like Intel was sitting on their asses for four years while K8 kicked the Pentium 4's sorry ass around. They didn't keep releasing Pentium 4 + 200MHz because they thought that would get them the lead back. They did it because they had to keep selling parts while the multi-year effort to get their new PPro-ancestry designs was going on. In the short term, though, Pentium 4 + 200 MHz was what they could do to try to keep pace, so they did it.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.