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 - Friday, October 17, 2003 - link
In response to anonymous "Intel Boy" (biased, biased, biased) you can be in love with Intel if you choose. My experience has been that AMD processors have always been smother running and they run cooler than Intel which increases processor life. The AMD64 is in its infancy. It will get better in the months to come.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
sorry I mean#107Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
To #117 you wrpote is totally truth but do u think a lot understand it ? thanks anyway :))Anonymous User - Monday, October 6, 2003 - link
For #4 and other intel fan boys.I understand that you are in furious, you think as chip costs higher it is better and you paid much more money for intel and what? It usually is deafeted by AMD again and you feel sorry especially after the scandal with BAPCo where became clear that BAPCO is witing benchmarks for intel to show tham in better lighte heh even in sys marks 2002 which is "broken" and AMD doesn't recognize this bench even in this test which must not be used by anand athlon51fx is better than 3200EE of intel. and I can't understand how u can defend Intel when thic processor has 3.2 Gghzs and is DEAFETED BY 2200Gghz ? more than 1.2 Gghz handicap. I'll never bye intel even in due of this caus here is clear for even the dumbiest donkeey which technologie is better. thats why real computer specialists always prefare AMD and love tham.
Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
These benchmark figures appear as if the P4 was used in a single channel setup. Does anybody know if this is correct? Also, ECC DDR-400 chips are very hard to come by, prohibitively expensive, and aren't available with low latencies. I don't think FX systems will be price competitive. What good is the high memory limit when you can only afford 512Mb, or a fast CPU with C3 memory? Too bad.Anonymous User - Friday, October 3, 2003 - link
Hi, this is about your Athlon 64 Vs. Pentium 4 article, specifically the use of Quake3 as a CPU benchmark when comparing AMD vs. Intel cpus, as shown on this pagehttp://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1884&a...
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTI0LDU=
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030923/athlon_64...
Let me say the article is great, no complaints there. I know it takes alot of work to produce these articles.
Now, I see two reasons for using a game as a cpu benchmark:
1) It presents a fair (emphasis on the word 'fair') comparison of the competing cpu architectures and scaling issues.
2) The game itself is of current interest to the community.
In your article you already concede 2). Quake3 itself is not relevant as a game to anybody. Quake3-derived games are another matter, and are still popular and certainly relevant. More on these later.
I believe there is strong evidence that Quake3 does not provide a fair benchmark for comparing *modern* (AthlonXP and possibly Athlon64 as well) AMD cpus vs Intel cpus. The reason being (and let me emphasize that I don't know this as an verified fact, I'm going on what a couple of programmers involved with helping AMD produce optimized game code have told me) that the Quake3 cpu recognition code does not recognize the AthlonXP as an SSE-capable cpu. Not only that, but the 3DNow code in Quake3 is apparently non-functional for this cpu.
The politics and history behind this are interesting, but probably boil down to the AthlonXP being released well after Quake3, and Carmack being rightly uninterested in patching an old game.
If this is true, you are benchmarking two equally SSE-capable cpus against each other, using a game engine which enables SSE for the Intel cpu and *disables* SSE for the AMD cpu (apparently there's no simple way to force SSE recognition either), for no valid reason, other than the game is too old to know about the AMD cpu's capabilities. What would be even worse is if this same recognition problem carries over to the Athlon64 (I have no word on this) and to newer Quake3-based games.
Again, assuming this is true, it removes any rationale for using a 3-year old game that: a) few people play, b) which gives ridiculously high scores, and which c) unfairly handicaps AMD cpus; as a benchmark to be used specifically in comparing AMD cpus vs their Intel competitors in articles such as this one.
So. Here are the recommendations I, as an interested Hardocp/Anand/Toms reader (and admitted AMD fan) am making to you and your site:
1) Investigate this matter further, and write an article discussing it. And in particular discuss the relevance of this cpu issue to current Quake3-based games. Assuming there is in fact an Intel bias to Quake3-based benchmarking I think people would be very interested to learn about it. Apparently the SSE issue does indeed carry over to later games.
2) Assuming there is a bias, discontinue using Quake3 as a cpu benchmark, and especially discontinue it's use when comparing AMD vs Intel cpus. The game will never be patched to fix this issue, and using 3rd party fixes noone cares about is more or less pointless too. I'm referring to the dlls on this page:
http://speedycpu.dyndns.org/opt/
This guy is one of the programmers I referred to earlier, and he tells me the dlls do not enable SSE where it really matters anyway. The other was a student working at AMD writing assembly 3DNow code. The best solution is simply to retire this benchmark, just as Q1 and Q2 were retired.
rms
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link
Not to be a ball buster, but in your paragraph:"For starters, at a 192mm^2, the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX are well above AMD's "sweet spot" for manufacturing. When we last talked with AMD's Fred Weber, 100 - 120mm^2 die size is ideal for mass production given AMD's wafer size, yields and other manufacturing characteristics - and the Athlon 64 is close to twice that size"
If you calculate it out, the 64FX is closer to 4x the die size of the "sweet spot". 192mm x 192mm = 36864 sq mm. The "sweet spot" is 100mm x 100mm = 10000 sq mm. Sorry, just figured I'd point that out.
-Kooldino
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
don't hold your breadth1 as far as ms is concerned the visual studio compilers is still not truly 32 bit let alone be 64 bit. without such compilers you cannot get 64 bit appsEven Winxp so claimed to be redisigend from bootom up is not true. Well its desigend from broken pieces on the ground hurriedly glued together. How come you still have a System and a System32 folders in c:\Windows??? Thats the 16bit and 32 bit DLLs. Why the sudden Blue scren of death? Same old problem - confilcts between DLLs.
Try writing code in Visual STudio and query the WinOS ver - for WinXP you will get WinNT as the response. HOw can a truly ground up redesigned OS behave as such? Beats me?
Until such time that WinXX OS is truly 32bit or 64 bit you cannot have any true 64 bit apps running.
The BIOS also have problems. nFOrce2 still buggy and not properly fixed - can you trust nForce3? If those guys cannot fix up nForce2, then nForce3 is gonna have lots more problems.
Locutus4657 - Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - link
#32,On what exactly are you basing your arguments? You obviously have no experience or knowledge of Win64... If you did you'd realize 64 bit versions of Windows NT date back to NT4 on DEC Alpha hardware... You obviously have no clue what so ever... Try posting a relevant argument next time... Try something based on benchmarks, and heck, next try even putting it into context as to how you use your computer...
Anonymous User - Monday, September 29, 2003 - link
all i know is i bought amd stock for less than $5 a few months ago and it's on the way to tripling in value. perhaps i'll use the profits to buy another one of their chips.