AMD Athlon 64 & Athlon 64 FX - It's Judgment Day
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 23, 2003 1:25 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Motherboard Support Powered by NVIDIA & VIA
Unlike the release of the original Athlon, AMD has full industry support behind the Athlon 64 (although the same can't be said for industry confidence). We have seen chipsets from ALi, NVIDIA, SiS and VIA, however only NVIDIA and VIA are dominating AMD's launch.
Our own Wesley Fink has prepared an article comparing the NVIDIA and VIA solutions, so be sure to check that out if you're interested in the detailed differences between the implementations of the two chipsets.
Because AMD has integrated the memory controller on the Athlon 64's die, the amount of work that needs to be done by the chipset vendors has been reduced significantly. The performance difference you'll see between chipsets should be negligible (even more so than in conventional architectures) as the only variables between chipsets are the South Bridge (IDE, PCI, SATA controllers) and the AGP controller.
AMD has no favorites in the chipset game; although they shipped all initial review systems with nForce3 boards, their reasoning was primarily one of availability, as they had to ship systems out in the summer to meet the deadlines faced by print publications.
As you will find out in Wesley's review, the nForce3 is currently limited to a 600MHz Hyper Transport link between the CPU and the chipset, while VIA's solution runs at 800MHz. The performance difference due to VIA's bandwidth lead is negligible however; remember, we're not talking about memory bandwidth, rather bandwidth between the CPU and the AGP controller. NVIDIA will have 800MHz support in the next version of the nForce3, the 250.
Despite the fact that chipset costs have gone down (as there's no more memory controller), motherboards will not reflect the lower price initially according to motherboard manufacturers. AMD is positioning the Athlon 64 as a premium part and thus the motherboard manufacturers will position their solutions competitively, but don't expect to see lower-than-Socket-A prices.
What's also interesting is the incredible recognition that NVIDIA has managed to establish in the chipset industry with the nForce brand. We are seeing incredible support for nForce3, despite the fact that it doesn't really offer anything above and beyond VIA's solution. We're expecting the nForce3 to be positioned as a premium solution, while VIA will compete for the lower end of the Athlon 64 market - all because of the success of NVIDIA's nForce2 brand; the name nForce3 somehow just sounds all that much more powerful, even though NVIDIA's powerful memory controller isn't being used.
At the start, it looks like NVIDIA will begin to pull ahead as the market leader, but it is unclear how VIA's support for an 800MHz HT bus and potentially lower price point will change things (if at all).
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#43 is a bit 486 DX style with 20 stages of pipeline up his crápperhole.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
ROFL@#36Dude the Athlon64 is a 32bit processor?....lol
Hey everyone...the p4 is a 16bit cpu with 32bit extensions.
Your an idiot #36. And this is coming from an Intel fanboy, so you really know your in the wrong.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Price is more important for AMD because they've had their successes mainly on the price/performance front. If they are truly trying to match Intel on price, that advantage is essentially gone and it'll be an even harder battle to gain marketshare.Oh and some of you fanboys mustve missed the PM forum. What the industry sees is completely different from what fanboys see.
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1873&am...
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Maybe if the intel & AMD both ran at the EXACT same clock it'd be fairer eh?I'd like to see more on the Opteron as I'm going to order 6 of them in November, thank the gods it's not my money.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
er... nm the above, I got it mixed up.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
FYI, in the LAME 3.93 MP3 encoding 32-bit vs 64-bit benchmark, you claim that 64-bit is 34% quicker when actually the graph shows it as 2/3.07*100 = 65% quicker.dvinnen - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Haha, this thread makes me laugh.1) The only thing Intel has that can toach FX-51 is the XeonMP, errrr, P4:EE. This processor doesn't start shipping for 2 to 3 months. I can understand including it in the review, but there should be some sort of disclaimer stating that this is a sample and may or not be reflective of the final product. The EE's also will only be released to the OEMs, so expect to have to pay VooDoo or AlienWare there outragous prices if you want one.
2) The Intel fanboys ADMITT defeat. They are already rationlizing it by saying wait for Prescott to come out. All prescott is is a p4 clocked to 3.4 ghz with "improved hyperthreading." "The 11 new intruction sets" won't make any difference for a year or so (kind of like 64 bit goodness that you are bashing). But I guess the added bonus that you can heat a small house with it is something that AMD can't provide.
And I wish people would stop complaing about the price. All new processors cost this much when they are first released. They'll come down, but not to the price of XPs for a while to come. The mobo costs will also drop drastcaly (past nForce2 prices?) over the comeing months beause of no north bridge and only a 6 layer PCB.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
64bit with 32bit compatibility would be what Itanium does. AMD64 is still native x86 with the ability to use 64-bit registers, thats why it can still run 32-bit programs as fast/faster than current CPUs.http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1815&a...
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#40 is a 64-bit moron.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
#36The Prescott is the next generation in the pentium family. It's not like it's a P4 with an increased multiplyer. AMD is in trouble when the Prescott comes rolling around.