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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."
At least it uses more power!
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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In the full announcement they also mention new 45W single-core desktop processors: Athlon 64 3500+ for $88, and 3800+ for $93.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
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
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?
Several things:
1. They have several production lines. They make more than one CPU type at a time. They are capable of simultaneously producing/testing 65nm while making 90nm parts.
2. Idle time in a fab is a KNOWN COST HAZARD. I'm not making this up. It costs money to keep rooms clean, pay the interest on the debt, etc
3. Word on the street [when I was an AMD employee...] was the average processor cost ~60-80$ USD in raw materials/time/effort to make (assuming 100% yield). Yes, your opteron cost about the same to make (excluding yield problems) as that $50 sempron. So why make semprons if they lose money? Yes, I know I'm discounting yield which does contribute real cost to the processors. On the opteron side though, my take [personal op] was that most of the cost was to recoup the R&D not the production costs.
Point is, both AMD and Intel produce low end parts that cost money. Even in the Celeron line which they call "mistakes" (e.g. parts with broken caches) that's not entirely true and is misleading. Even if you made a defective cache, it costs more money to just throw the die out, then to package it as a celeron and sell it at a loss.
4. Intel cores are fast, but they're not the be-all. They still lack NUMA support which is handy in HPC environments (re: not your desktop). They're also not quite a strong in the ALU front (though from my crypto benchmarks are VERY VERY close).
I'm by no means an AMD fanboi. Hell, my desktop is a core2. But I still love my 2-way Opteron workstation and get it to do things that run circles around the core2 (like hosting 15 engineers running simulations/verifications/etc).
Buy what you need, not what some lame commercial on TV tells you. For many, the core2 is the best buy. It's fast, wicked low power and the cost isn't bad. For others, AMD is the better buy (cheaper) or simply more powerful (opterons).
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
It does.
With Athlons, the memory controller are on the northbridge (just like Intel's). You can put whatever memory on the mother board, as long you put the correct north bridge.
So that's why you have both SDR and DDR Socket A mother boards.
That's not how is works with Athlon 64s : They have on die memory controller. The type of memory you can connect to the mother board is directly determined by the type of processor. And until recently each type of processor has it's own connector :
Single Channel DDR : Socket 754
Dual Channel DDR : Socket 939
Dual Channel DDR2 : Socket AM2
Only from now on will you have mutually compatible AM2/AM2+/AM3 mother board, which will use mechanically compatible connectors and the limitation will be only be the memory controllers on the chips (AM3 processors have both DDR2 and DDR3 and can got in all 3 motherboard. AM2 chips only have DDR2 and only go in AM2/2+ MB).
On Athlon 64 motherboard, the nortbridge is nothing more than a controller in charge of peripherals and their busses and doesn't touch the memory at all. It's completly agnostic of the memory and only speaks "Hypertransport" to the CPU. It is mutually interchangeable with all mother board. And in fact you can find the exact same VIA KT880 AGP chipset on mother board from 754 all the way up to AM2, regardless of the memory.
You can make different king of motherboard with the same chipset.
But 939 Processor can only connect to DDR memory, so you're stuck with it.
(On the otherhand, we could imagine building PCI-e nForce6 motherboards for Socket 754 CPUs and AGP KT880 mother board for AM3 connectors. But no company curently bothers.)
As a side note, that's one of the reason why Athlon64 have a smaller cache :
- Unlike Intels they're not limited by the bus speed for memory transfers. They have access to memory at full speed.
- Memory access is direct, without having first to be processed by north bridge and latency is much lower.
Of course now that DDR2 (and even more DDR3) have higher latency, these advantages don't shine any more.
To see it by yourself can look at the trace on the mother board. On regular mother board, the north bridge is in the middle and has trace both to the memory and to the CPU. The CPU is only linked to the northbridge.
On athlon64 mother board, the traces go from the memory to the CPU. The north bridge is only connected to the CPU.
In fact now that the AM2/2+/3 familiy has been declared upward compatible, you may start to see the same kind of compatibility that we had back with the Slot-1 connector which could be used with the first Pentium IIs all the way up to the latest Pentium II Tualatins (given one uses the correct slotket).
And this what exactly this is all about : AMD *does want* a stable socket so they can attract potential chip makers that will be interested in making specialized coprocessors that will remain compatible thru all upgrades from AM2 to AM3.
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