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

[yurtinus]

Y'know, I was enjoying reading all the little nuggets of wisdom (Video cards that could use as much as 512 mb of address space, $700 for 2GB of RAM). Then I was thinking "hey, the computer I had before this one was an Athlon 64, it wasn't *that* long ago!" Then I realized it was. Then I felt old. Now I'm crying.

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

Those bastards

[LodCrappo]

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?

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.