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AMD Athlon 64 6000+ Launched And Tested

Posted by Zonk on from the kicking-the-tires-lighting-the-fires dept.

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."

10 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. DOS by Short+Circuit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've always wanted to try running DOS on a processor with 1MB of L2 cache...there's just something retro wicked about running an OS where the entire base memory fits in on-die cache.

    I have to wonder if qemu and the kernel's kvm will allow me to dedicate an entire core to a DOS image.

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    1. Re:DOS by ArcherB · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I have to wonder if qemu and the kernel's kvm will allow me to dedicate an entire core to a DOS image.

      Or you could just boot off of a DOS formatted USB key. I remember hearing that the Athlon64 would run all OS's down to DOS 2, I believe.

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  2. cool by jrwr00 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I would still buy this over intel's processor, my god, that thing has alot of pins

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    1. Re:cool by Tekzel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I only buy AMD. Even if it is currently a "worse performer" (and that is by a much smaller margin than that the Athlon 64 had over Intel's NetBurst processors for a long time at that). I like AMD and think they are good for the market. If they went poof over night Intel would rape the CPU market like marauding viking horde. As I am sure AMD would if Intel went poof. They keep each other honest.

  3. Re:Low power chips too by D3m0n0fTh3Fall · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The review mentions this on the last page anyway. I too would be more interested in these low power chips. The ultra low power X2 would have to be the most interesting proposition for a home server... 35 Watts or something?

  4. Re:Unfortunately? by Machtyn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's unfortunate to AMD and those who would support AMD. The customer gets a hotter, more power hungry processor, that is probably just as, if not more, expensive than a cooler, slower GHz rated Intel processor that outperforms the Athlon.

  5. silly but ... by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Seems silly to release another 90nm part before the move to 65nm but keep in mind their are DIFFERENT LINES/TEAMS working at AMD. It's not like the production people working on retail 90nm parts are the same as the people testing new 65nm techniques.

    AMD is just trying to get as much non-idle time out of the fab as possible before they move everything to 65nm.

    It's the same reason why they make "el-cheapo sempron" parts and sell them AT A LOSS. It's better to lose a few bucks than a lot. And idle time in a fab costs a lot of money.

    Tom

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  6. You make incorrect assumptions by lcnxw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The design and development of a processor has improved vastly since the days of borked multipliers. There are standard benchmark tests that engineers use to rate their designs in-house. If AMD chooses to go with smaller caches, I would imagine they have very good reasons.

    Perhaps in order to keep good performance when communicating between caches they need to keep the number of memory addresses low so that the overhead stays low. They decided that separate caches was a better model, and they currently have to maximize performance with this design.

    AMD might have favored their server market when choosing this design and separate cache works better for server machines. They may need to refine their architecture for the desktop market. Don't be so quick to accuse AMD of making cache mistakes without doing the math for find the theoretical best solution.

  7. Re:Not a very helpful benchmark by Ecuador · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Exactly.
    Very few hardware journalists can set up tests that are useful for people who don't just load Win XP to play the latest
    FPS.
    My office, just like my university lab before, is fully 64-bit linux running custom programs. Anyway, some people (including myself) posted some sample benchmarks here recently (http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2216 76&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=17960 946), but I would like to see some serious benchmarking from hardware sites. Anandtech has done some good benchmarking in the past...

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  8. Re:Question for the AMD fans/afficianados by vandan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's a pretty strange thing to say. It's like saying "What's the point of all the other car manufacturers competing with Porsche? They should quit releasing crappy cars and invest in R&D until they can produce a better car than Porsche".

    Of course, not everyone buys Porsches, just as not everyone buys Intel's top-of-the-line chip. AMD's chips are always better value. Always.

    I've never bought the most expensive CPU available. I always go for the best tradeoff between price and performance. It's called value . Don't they teach anything in schools these days?