The Chip That Changed the World: AMD's 64-bit FX-51, Ten Years Later

Dputiger writes "It's been a decade since AMD's Athlon 64 FX-51 debuted — and launched the 64-bit x86 extensions that power the desktop and laptop world today. After a year of being bludgeoned by the P4, AMD roared back with a vengeance, kicking off a brief golden age for its own products, and seizing significant market share in desktops and servers." Although the Opteron was around before, it cost a pretty penny. I'm not sure it's fair to say that the P4 was really bludgeoning the Athlon XP though (higher clock speeds, but NetBurst is everyone's favorite Intel microarchitecture to hate). Check out the Athlon 64 FX review roundup from 2003.

Comments

The old days

[Thanshin]

Those were the good old days. How I miss when it took me one day at most to learn about all options I had to build a gaming computer, with enough detail to make an informed decision about what bits and pieces to built it with.

Nowadays just piercing the veil of lies, half truths, false reports and bought reviews, makes the entire process incredibly boring and frustrating.

Re:The old days

[Dunbal]

It's still pretty much common sense. You want a fast CPU, so not the top of the line $1000 chip, take a step back or two and go for the one selling in the $300-$500 range. Motherboard for that chip from someone you trust - ASUS, Gigabyte, etc. Again never the $500 "gamer" board, take a step back, there are some really nice ones for $200 or so. Latest generation graphics card, or top end from last generation (assuming the prices have come down), plenty of memory on the card. Power supply that can feed the card what it needs and then some. Plenty of system RAM. SSD hard drive. Water/Air cooling system for your CPU type. And you're set! Shouldn't take a whole "day" to check those out. An hour or two would suffice.

Re:The old days

[ArcadeMan]

The good old days was the 286 era, when all you needed to know what the clock speed of the CPU, EGA was four times better than CGA and SoundBlaster was AdLib compatible.

Of course, you had to deal with XMS and EMS memory settings, loading your mouse driver into high memory and solving IRQ and DMA conflicts between your ISA add-on cards.

Screw that, the good old days are today. Take out the iMac from the box, plug it in the wall socket and start using it right away.

Made me miss the old Slashdot

[ElementOfDestruction]

It seems we've lost a lot of quality in the comment fields in the last 10 years. Lots of expertise modded up carefully; now we seemingly have opinion-pieces moderated up by whichever group happens to be awake at the time, and the real expertise is hidden in the +2 or below.

Re:Made me miss the old Slashdot

[Billly Gates]

Yeah like the hot grits down your pants, Natalie Portman naked and petrified, gay niggers association, penis bird registrations in ASCI, and of course who could have forgotten Goatse I mean LITERALLY forget! Ahoot one goatse troll had a +3 and got +90 responses with MY EYES?!! By a moderator trying to be funny.

No I dont miss those days as we tend to remember only the good ones

Re:Before AMD committed suicide

[bill_mcgonigle]

AMD is very competitive for many-cores workloads. To get an equivalent core count on Intel can be as much as a second AMD system. AMD has gone more wide, Intel has gone more deep. Both have their applications.

10 years later and applications are still 32bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years later and we're still running games and applications that are 32bit that only use a single core.

Re:Before AMD committed suicide

[h4rr4r]

For games sure, but there are lots of workloads that are not games.

Re:Before AMD committed suicide

[bored]

The spec benchmarks tell a different story, and tend to be more representative because each vendor does their best rather than intel/nvidia providing "free" performance enhancement advice for game companies.

So, from my own experience the Amd/Intel story is a lot closer than some of these benchmarks might lead you to believe. Especially for server applications.

Its pretty easy with modern CPU's to make fairly small tweaks that give advantage to one CPU or another. We have a bunch of microbenchmarks for our application, and things like memcpy performance can be swung 2x-4x. Or even the depth of loop unrolling for some things. In one loop the intel it may like 2x and the AMD like 4x unroll. With each one tuned to run best on the platform the bottom line performance is often quite similar, but run the AMD optimized one on the intel, or the reverse and suddenly one or the other CPU appears to be trouncing the other.

Bechmark what people use? Which people?

[coder111]

Ok, I'm a Java developer, working on Linux. 99% of benchmarks you see on-line are benchmarks of some stuff on Windows, which is immediately skewed towards intel because lots of Windows DLLs are built with Intel compiler which disables optimizations and advanced features on non-intel CPUs, even if those features are supported.

Also, most benchmarks are some synthetic benchmarks (compiled with Intel compiler), or some 3D games, or some video transcoding. I do none of that, and what I do I do not do it on Windows. I am yet to see a site that benchmarks Java compilers, Java IDEs, databases, application or Java web servers, etc. on Intel vs AMD vs ARM platforms on Linux. The only site that comes close is Phoronix. And if you look at their Linux benchmarks, difference between AMD and Intel CPUs is much less than on Anandtech or Toms Hardware. Intel is still making faster CPUs, but not that much faster.

--Coder

Re:Still better IMHO

[Anaerin]

Unfortunately, not everyone has the ready cash available to buy every CPU, set up a complete system for each, and benchmark them. We plebians have to rely on other people to do that kind of testing for us. And when a great deal of websites, all doing independent benchmarks and reviews, all show AMD getting their collective asses handed to them on a regular basis at the moment, I tend to lend those reviews some weight.