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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."
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.
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.
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/
Perhaps more to the point -- I'm curious about the raw integer performance of the AMD64 vs Core2 parts. A great deal of the extra performance that the Core2 parts demonstrate is due to their single-cycle SSE engines (which the upcoming AMD parts will match), but if your code doesn't use SSE (ie your typical server app) then all of these desktop-type benchmarks are worthless.
I'd also love to see a native 64-bit (integer) benchmark as well, both with and without SSE-enabled tests.
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
The X2 names are double the clock speed (in MHz) for 1MB cache parts, 200 less than that for 512kB cache parts, and 400 less for the 256kB cache part. It seems they've stopped looking at them as Intel cpu performance equivalence numbers. The single-core chips still seem to be named pretty much arbitrarily.
Complete list:
3000MHz dual-core 1MB = 3000x2 = 6000
2800MHz dual-core 1MB = 2800x2 = 5600
2800MHz dual-core 512kB = 2800x2 - 200 = 5400
2600MHz dual-core 1MB = 2600x2 = 5200
2600MHz dual-core 512kB = 2600x2 - 200 = 5000
2500MHz dual-core 512kB = 2500x2 - 200 = 4800
2400MHz dual-core 1MB = 2400x2 = 4800
2400MHz dual-core 512kB = 2400x2 - 200 = 4600
2300MHz dual-core 512kB = 2300x2 - 200 = 4400
2200MHz dual-core 1MB = 2200x2 = 4400
2200MHz dual-core 512kB = 2200x2 - 200 = 4200
2100MHz dual-core 512kB = 2100x2 - 200 = 4000
2000MHz dual-core 1MB = 2000x2 = 4000
2000MHz dual-core 512kB = 2000x2 - 200 = 3800
2000MHz dual-core 256kB = 2000x2 - 400 = 3600
1900MHz dual-core 512kB = 1900x2 - 200 = 3600