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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.
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.
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.
I only just replaced my Athlon 64 motherboard and processor this spring. It was a good product, but not quite up to running Windows 8 IMHO.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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10 years later and we're still running games and applications that are 32bit that only use a single core.
Wow. Ten years. And here I am still dealing with 64 bit incompatability issues every six months or so.
Out of curiosity, how long did 16bit library problems linger after the 32 bit move?
May the Maths Be with you!
They are still competitive on the performance per $ scale, and provide cpu's adequate for almost all standard needs.
Tell that to Tomshardware and others who use x87 benchmarks and games like skyrim showing an AMD 8 core being handed a smackdown by an i3?
No one believes in AMD anymore
http://saveie6.com/
for gaming, the GPU took over most of the work which is the way it should have happened
for applications, most don't really need 2 cores. even running multiple apps at the same time you don't really need 2 cores. i was playing MP3's on a computer in the 1990's with minimal CPU usage. there is no way you need to dedicate a whole core to music while surfing the internet. or some of the other idiotic use cases people make up
AMD still makes a better chip for many FP intensive applications, and the price is still superior to Intel to boot. Intel always made a big deal about clock speed, while AMD worked on actual performance. It is really a shame that people pay more attention to marketing than real performance.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
For games sure, but there are lots of workloads that are not games.
and many games are not made by Bugthesda.
Tell that to Tomshardware and others who use x87 benchmarks and games like skyrim showing an AMD 8 core being handed a smackdown by an i3?
True, it's horrible that review sites benchmark CPUs using the kind of programs people actually run on them.
I remember back when I bought my P4, the only thing a similarly priced Athlon XP really beat it on were x87-intensive games. Professional 3D apps using SSE were significantly faster on the P4, which is why I ended up buying it instead.
As the author of the article:
In 2000 - 2001, the Athlon / Athlon XP were far ahead of the P4. But from Jan 2002 to March 2003, Intel increased the P4's clock speed by 60% and introduced Hyper-Threading. SSE2 became more popular during the same time. As a result, the P4 was far ahead of Athlon XP by the spring of the year in most content creation, business, and definitely 3D rendering workloads. Now it's true that an awful lot of benchmark shenanigans were going on at the same time, and the difference between the two cores was much smaller in high-end gaming. But if you wanted the best 'all around' CPU, the P4 Northwood + HT at 2.8 - 3.2GHz was the way to go. Northwoods were also good overclockers -- it was common to pick up a 2.4GHz P4 and clock it to 3 - 3.2GHz with HT.
Athlon 64 kicked off the process of changing that, but what really did the trick was 1). Prescott's slide backwards as far as IPC and thermals and 2) The introduction of dual-core. It really was a one-two punch -- Intel couldn't put two Pentium 4 3.8GHz chips on a die together, so the 820 Prescott was just 3.2GHz. AMD, meanwhile, *could* put a pair of 2.4GHz Athlon 64's on a single chip. Combine that with Prescott's terrible efficiency, and suddenly the Athlon 64 was hammering into the P4 in every workload.
AMD, forgotten by most of you, purchased a CPU design company not long after it lost the right to clone Intel CPU designs. The people from this company gave AMD a world beating x86 architecture that became the Athlon XP and then Athlon 64 (and true first x86 dual core), thrashing Intel even though AMD was spending less than ONE-HUNDREDTH of Intel's R&D spend.
What happened? AMD top management sabotaged ALL future progress on new AMD CPUs, in order to maximise salaries, bonuses and pensions. A tiny clique of cynical self-serving scumbags ruined every advantage AMD had gained over Intel for more than 5 years afterwards. Eventually AMD replaced its top management, but by that time it was too late for the CPU. Obviously, AMD had far more success on the GPU side after buying ATI. (PS note that ATI had an identical rise to success, when that company also bought a GPU design team that became responsible for ALL of ATI's world-beating GPU designs. Neither AMD nor ATI initially had in-house talent good enough to produce first rate designs.)
Today, AMD is ALMOST back on track. It's Kaveri chip (2014) will be the most compelling part for all mains powered PCs below high-end/serious gaming. In the mobile space, Intel seems likely to have the power-consumption advantage (for x86) across the next 1.5 years at least. However, even this is complicated by the fact that Nvidia is ARM, and AMD is following Nvidia, and is soon to combine its world beating GPU with ARM CPU cores.
At this exact moment, AMD can only compete on price in the CPU market. Loaded, its chips use TWICE the power of Intel parts. In heavy gaming, average Intel i5 chips (4-core) usually wallop AMD's best 8-cores. In other heavy apps, AMD at best draws equal, but just as commonly lags Intel.
Where AMD currently exterminates Intel is with SoC designs. AMD won total control of the console market, providing the chips for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. Intel (and Nvidia) were literally NOT in the running for these contracts, having nothing usable to offer, even at higher prices or lower performance.
AMD is currently improving the 'bulldozer' CPU architecture once again for the Kaveri 4-core (+ massive integrated GPU and 256-bit bus) parts of 2014. There is every reason to think this new CPU design will be at rough parity with Intel's Sandybridge, in which case Intel will be in serious trouble in the mains-powered desktop market.
Intel is in a slow but fatal decline. Intel is currently selling its new 'atom' chips below cost (illegal, but Intel just swallows the court fines) in an attempt to take on ARM, but even though Intel's 'atom' chips are actually Sandybridge class, and have a process advantage, they are slaughtered by Apple's new A7 ARM chip found in the latest iPhones. A7 uses the latest ARM-64 bit design known as ARMv8, making the A7 and excellent point of comparison with the original Athlon 64 from years back.
Again, AMD is now x86 *and* ARM. AMD has two completely distinct and good x86 architectures ('stars-class' and 'bulldozer-class'. Intel is only x86, and now with the latest 'Atom' has only ONE x86 architecture in its worthwhile future lineup. Intel has other x86 architectures, but they are complete no-hopers like the original Atom family, the hilariously awful Larabee family, and the putrid new micro-controller family. Only Intel's current sandybridge/ivybridge/haswell/new-atom architecture has any value.
Tell that to Tomshardware and others who use x87 benchmarks and games like skyrim showing an AMD 8 core being handed a smackdown by an i3?
Awesome, you found a workload where deeper is better. Now go try costing out a cluster with hardware virtualization and ECC RAM to support several thousand SMP virtual machines and see what you come up with.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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Apple just released a 64bit processor, and now AMD is copying it TEN YEARS ago?!?
Can the industry please do something original and quit just following wherever Apple leads it?
-Lod
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.
Perhaps you should read the second chart here. That's testing encoding with Handbrake (Which is essentially a graphical frontend to x264). In that particular test, the i5-4670K wipes the floor with the comparably priced FX-8350, even without the former's huge overclocking potential.
True, it's horrible that review sites benchmark CPUs using the kind of programs people actually run on them.
Yes, and no. If your a gamer, obviously having a CPU that the games are optimized for is a big win. But don't extrapolate general performance from a single benchmark. Especially when one of the CPU vendors is providing "free" performance help for the game/application.
At this point, its pretty clear that choosing the Intel is the correct choice for big name games.
We will see if this changes over the next few years with the consoles being AMD based. The game companies are going to optimizing for those platforms, we will see if any of that carries over into game benchmarks for desktop machines. In many cases its possible to get a 2x delta by optimizing for a particular CPU/platform at the expense of the general case.
As for SSE, AMD has always been a little behind with SSE (well duh, they follow whatever intel is doing and it takes them a while to catchup), so if your application is built for the latest version of SSE, and its gaining something from it, then running a similar version without hurts. Recently seen with SSE 4.1/4a where there were a couple useful instructions for some code paths that didn't exist on the AMD and hurt it on benchmarks using SSE4.
Not that it mattered to the P4-area contest(where desktop OSes and workloads would remain 32 bit for quite some time to come, and RAM fairly expensive); but the A64 was a real smack in the face for IA64...
Intel has their grand, big-iron-class, future-of-enterprise-computing 64-bit architecture, then AMD pops up "Hi guys, who wants a 64-bit CPU, fully backwards compatible with your 32-bit x86 code and pretty damn fast at that, for only slightly more than the price of a nice desktop CPU?"
Boom. Headshot. Game over man, game over.
The overclockable 2.4-2.8 Northwoods kept up on the 32 bit side at the time, and Intel has since swallowed their pride and put out some genuinely brutal 'EMT64' parts; but IA64 was buried beyond hope.
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
They swooped in when Intel was being stupid, made the best chips in the world... then committed suicide and
If, by committed suicide, you mean that suffered when intel bribed people like Dell not to use the clearly superior products and so lots out on many billions of sales and hence the crucial R&D advantage, then yeah sure suicide.
Assisted suicide.
Like assisted like throwing a healthy happy person off a clifff.
haven't built a competitive chip in 3 years. Sad times...
Depends what for. For games, intel seem to be better IF you're prepared to buy a separate GPU. If you look on the Linux, not Window centric benchmarks, the top end AMD ones often lie somewhere between the top end i5 and the top end i7.
Sometimes they lose out sometimes thy beat the i7s.
For the kind of stuff I do, they're very competitive.
But if you play skyrim, then no. But an i5 and an external graphics card.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Oracle's Enterprise database costs $47,500 per processor core. There is no way in heck that I'd choose AMD over Intel when I have to run more cores to get the same performance.
Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise costs $6,874 per processor core.
AMD has a heavy investment in the server space. They should negotiate lower per-core license costs in these cases; license parity with Intel is throwing them out of the data center.
As the developers of x86-64, they should have a patent portfolio to do serious damage to 64-bit x86 systems vendors. Use it.
So the focus on consoles in the industry, plus the lingering zombie life of Windows XP, had basically kept everyone stuck at Direct3D 9/Shader Model 3 and 32-bit for years. With next-generation consoles moving to Direct3D 11/Shader Model 5 and 64-bit, we should see more PC titles that take advantage of the latest generation PC hardware. BTW, for some technical background on 64-bit and gaming, see http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3602/sponsored_feature_ram_vram_and_.php
Most don't really need two cores, but that's not a reason not to want two cores.
I fell in love with multiple core processors when I first got one, not because my computer in general became faster (I'll bet that all but one of my cores are idling most of the time) but because my computer wouldn't get unresponsive when I was doing computationally heavy tasks (or programs crashed).
I go by Cinebench myself. It seems completely neutral.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/06/12/intel-core-i5-4670k-haswell-cpu-review/6
The instruction set itself was an yawner - I was looking forward to 64-bit being the point where all CPUs become RISC, and where Windows NT could go from being Wintel only to NT/RISC.
However, one delicious piece of irony that I love about the Opteron/Athlon 64 is that this was the architecture that sunk the Itanic. If the Itanium sank far worthier chips before it - PA-RISC, DEC Alpha and MIPS V, this architecture brought out the Itanic in Itanium. Originally, the Itanium was supposed to be the 64 bit replacement for x86, but thanks to this gag from AMD, it never happened. Instead, AMD started stealing the market, and to add insult to injury, when Intel tried entering w/ 64-bit extensions of its own, Microsoft forced them to be AMD compatible. So that Intel was ultimately forced to let x64 be the successor to x86, and let Itanium wither on the vine.
Once that happened, Itanium followed the same path as the better CPUs that it killed above. Microsoft dropped support for it after Server 2008 and XP or Vista were never supported, Monterrey collapsed and to add insult to injury, even Linux - the OS that boasts about being ported everywhere - didn't want to remain supported on the Itanic. Today, the Itanic has as many OSs as the DEC Alpha had at its peak - 3: HP/UX, Debian Linux and FreeBSD.
So no, the x64 didn't change the world. But it sure sunk the Itanic!