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AMD Athlon 64 6000+ Launched And Tested
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Feb 20, 2007 09:46 AM
from the kicking-the-tires-lighting-the-fires dept.
from the kicking-the-tires-lighting-the-fires dept.
Spinnerbait writes "AMD officially launched their next speed bump in the Athlon 64 product line,
in the form of
a new 3GHz part branded the Athlon 64 6000+. This new dual-core Athlon
64 sports 1MB of on-chip cache per core and is designed for AMD's Socket AM2
platform. This chip is still built on AMD's 90nm fab node and is comprised
of some 227 million transistors. It also carries a thermal power profile
of about 125Watts. Unfortunately, in all the
benchmarks seen here, it was still unable to catch Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700
chip at 2.66GHz."
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But hey... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:But hey... (Score:5, Funny)
Burn karma, burn.
-nB
Parent
Re:But hey... (Score:5, Informative)
Complete list:
3000MHz dual-core 1MB = 3000x2 = 6000
2800MHz dual-core 1MB = 2800x2 = 5600
2800MHz dual-core 512kB = 2800x2 - 200 = 5400
2600MHz dual-core 1MB = 2600x2 = 5200
2600MHz dual-core 512kB = 2600x2 - 200 = 5000
2500MHz dual-core 512kB = 2500x2 - 200 = 4800
2400MHz dual-core 1MB = 2400x2 = 4800
2400MHz dual-core 512kB = 2400x2 - 200 = 4600
2300MHz dual-core 512kB = 2300x2 - 200 = 4400
2200MHz dual-core 1MB = 2200x2 = 4400
2200MHz dual-core 512kB = 2200x2 - 200 = 4200
2100MHz dual-core 512kB = 2100x2 - 200 = 4000
2000MHz dual-core 1MB = 2000x2 = 4000
2000MHz dual-core 512kB = 2000x2 - 200 = 3800
2000MHz dual-core 256kB = 2000x2 - 400 = 3600
1900MHz dual-core 512kB = 1900x2 - 200 = 3600
Parent
Re:But hey... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
DOS (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to wonder if qemu and the kernel's kvm will allow me to dedicate an entire core to a DOS image.
Re:DOS (Score:5, Interesting)
Or you could just boot off of a DOS formatted USB key. I remember hearing that the Athlon64 would run all OS's down to DOS 2, I believe.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'd hate to be part of that QA department...
Re:DOS (Score:4, Funny)
There's retro... there's wicked... and then there's DOS.
-matthew
Parent
Re:DOS (Score:4, Informative)
My AMD 64 3800+ has FreeDOS [freedos.org] on the 2nd partition of my 1st hard drive. It is formatted as a FAT-16 partition. It is one of the choices on the GRUB boot menu [wikipedia.org]. I only boot up DOS every once in a while, but it does run on my AMD 64 computer. About a year ago or so ago I had IBM PC DOS 2000 installed on the 1st partion which also ran well. I later reformatted that partition as NTFS and installed Windows 2000 on my first partition instead. I still have FreeDOS on the 2nd partition. I have Slackware Linux installed on my 3rd partition and in that case I have 32-bit version of Linux running on a 64-bit computer. On a logical partition I have the AMD-64 version of Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Linux [kubuntu.org] which is what I like best and use most of the time.
An easier way to run an old DOS program under Linux or Windows would be to just use the free DOSBox [sourceforge.net] program. In the past, I also used VMWare and had PC DOS 2000 installed on one the the virtual machines. With VMWare I was able to run Linux, Windows and DOS all at once.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
>>> 1000000000000000+1000000000000000
2000000000000000L
>>>
1 quadrillion + 1 quadrillion = 2 quadrillion. Have a nice day.
Low power chips too (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A few months ago, I decided to build a fanless desktop.* The socket AM2 had recently debuted, so I decided to buy one of them and pair it with one of the new low-power Semprons. It took days just to
cool (Score:2, Interesting)
Question for the AMD fans/afficianados (Score:2, Insightful)
Wouldn't they have been better served re-routing this R&D effort/money into something which would put them back on top of either the price or performance curves?
Re:Question for the AMD fans/afficianados (Score:5, Insightful)
Both manufacturers hurry out minor iterations of their existing processor set while readying the next generation; it's a stop-loss tactic, since they can pop something like this out in the engineering equivalent of an afternoon, and it masks the fact that they're falling behind. Rather like the Pentium IV QRSTTurboMach5's that were coming out almost weekly back when Athlon was pantsing Intel. Intel knew they sucked just as much as we did -- but not releasing them would have terminated their share price.
Besides -- your average Dell buyer only sees "New Release", not benchmarks.
Parent
Re:Question for the AMD fans/afficianados (Score:4, Insightful)
I am still ever hopeful to see what AMD does at 45nm.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Question for the AMD fans/afficianados (Score:4, Insightful)
Realistically, there's so much transition going on right now, DX10 cards, new operating systems, multiple cores, I think it's best to let this storm even out for another 6-12 months before considering a full upgrade. So for now, plop in that new CPU or GPU, if need be, and have fun!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I also got a 939 rig, and I haven't quite understood the whole AM2 move from AMD. From what I've seen so far, AM2 doesn't bring a whole lot of improvements to the table, but what it does is equalize the upgrade costs between an AMD system and an Intel system. And in these days, that's hurting AMD bad I suspect.
If AMD needs some easy cash, why not release something for the 939 system? A reasonably priced, speedy dual core for instanc
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
AM2=DDR2 Ram
Re: (Score:2)
AM2=DDR2 Ram
That's part of my point, but I fail to see yours. I was talking about taking one of the beefier X2's they had for the 939 and ship it cheap.
Memory controller is on die. (Score:4, Informative)
It does.
With Athlons, the memory controller are on the northbridge (just like Intel's). You can put whatever memory on the mother board, as long you put the correct north bridge.
So that's why you have both SDR and DDR Socket A mother boards.
That's not how is works with Athlon 64s : They have on die memory controller. The type of memory you can connect to the mother board is directly determined by the type of processor. And until recently each type of processor has it's own connector :
Single Channel DDR : Socket 754
Dual Channel DDR : Socket 939
Dual Channel DDR2 : Socket AM2
Only from now on will you have mutually compatible AM2/AM2+/AM3 mother board, which will use mechanically compatible connectors and the limitation will be only be the memory controllers on the chips (AM3 processors have both DDR2 and DDR3 and can got in all 3 motherboard. AM2 chips only have DDR2 and only go in AM2/2+ MB).
On Athlon 64 motherboard, the nortbridge is nothing more than a controller in charge of peripherals and their busses and doesn't touch the memory at all. It's completly agnostic of the memory and only speaks "Hypertransport" to the CPU. It is mutually interchangeable with all mother board. And in fact you can find the exact same VIA KT880 AGP chipset on mother board from 754 all the way up to AM2, regardless of the memory.
You can make different king of motherboard with the same chipset.
But 939 Processor can only connect to DDR memory, so you're stuck with it.
(On the otherhand, we could imagine building PCI-e nForce6 motherboards for Socket 754 CPUs and AGP KT880 mother board for AM3 connectors. But no company curently bothers.)
As a side note, that's one of the reason why Athlon64 have a smaller cache :
- Unlike Intels they're not limited by the bus speed for memory transfers. They have access to memory at full speed.
- Memory access is direct, without having first to be processed by north bridge and latency is much lower.
Of course now that DDR2 (and even more DDR3) have higher latency, these advantages don't shine any more.
To see it by yourself can look at the trace on the mother board. On regular mother board, the north bridge is in the middle and has trace both to the memory and to the CPU. The CPU is only linked to the northbridge.
On athlon64 mother board, the traces go from the memory to the CPU. The north bridge is only connected to the CPU.
In fact now that the AM2/2+/3 familiy has been declared upward compatible, you may start to see the same kind of compatibility that we had back with the Slot-1 connector which could be used with the first Pentium IIs all the way up to the latest Pentium II Tualatins (given one uses the correct slotket).
And this what exactly this is all about : AMD *does want* a stable socket so they can attract potential chip makers that will be interested in making specialized coprocessors that will remain compatible thru all upgrades from AM2 to AM3.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Sometimes you release a product when the schedule dictates in order to keep your existing customers happy.
Manufacturing != R&D (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, if you're behind, then it is even more imperative that you continue releasing parts that keep you competitive. If you were in 2nd place in a stock car race, would you refrain from pulling a tight inside turn because it would only close the gap with 1st, not actually allow you to overtake?
Wouldn't they have been better served re-routing this R&D effort/money i
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, not everyone buys Porsches, just as not everyone buys Intel's top-of-the-line chip. AMD's chips are always better value. Always.
I've never bought the most expensive CPU available. I always go for the best tradeoff between price and performance. It's called
Speed Bump? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Speed Bump? (Score:4, Funny)
Is that what those are for? I thought it was so that you knew you were going fast enough when you caught air off the bump. If you're going too slow, it's not a bump, right?
Parent
Unfortunately? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's unfortunate about it? It's just a fact.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's unfortunate to AMD and those who would support AMD. The customer gets a hotter, more power hungry processor, that is probably just as, if not more, expensive than a cooler, slower GHz rated Intel processor that outperforms the Athlon.
The AMD processors are cheaper than the Intel chips and the difference becomes even more noticeable when you throw in the difference in motherboard costs. I was pricing this out the other week when I wanted to upgrade. I considered a core2 but then looked at the total
Re: (Score:2)
But in the aggregate, it is unfortunate because the announcement of a new processor release suggests a hope of pushing the highest achievable performance up, and it is unfortunate that a new product does not fulfill such a hope. This is an industry-wide, vendor neutral way of expressing how it is unfortunate.
But, ultimately, it's probably because the writer is an AMD fanboy and really would like to claim some victory over Intel above and beyond what existing products cou
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like them to one-up each other every day of the week. And the day they don't, I want it to be the one with deep pockets to move from dividends to R&D that is falling behind. Then again, the Core 2 Duo/Quad is pretty much exactly a result of this... Whenever Intel are seriously threatened, they push out damn good products. Last time around was when AMD was trying to reach the laptop market and they came up with Pentium M, also a damn good processor for it
Not a very helpful benchmark (Score:5, Insightful)
A 32 bit OS. The real strength of the AMD 64 architecture is running in 64 bit mode - benchmarking this chip compared to other 64 bit architectures would be far more helpful than running a 32bit Sandra tests and Photoshop tests on it.
Not a very helpful benchmark. I'd like to see these chips compared running 64 bit OS's - and compare the speed and throughput of applications like Apache, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, PHP / Perl scripting, and raw image processing - not Photoshop, where most of the time is spent waiting on the user to do something.
Re:Not a very helpful benchmark (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd also love to see a native 64-bit (integer) benchmark as well, both with and without SSE-enabled tests.
Parent
It's all about the cache... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Intel chips carry 4 to 8 Mb of cache. The thing about the Intel architecture is that the cache is shared across both or all 4 cores. In contrast the AMD chips have a dedicated *tiny* 1 MB cache for the consumer chips and 2mb per core on the high-end parts.
With that said, the reality of dual core computing is that one core is used much more heavily than the other. In Intel's case this means that one core is basically given the entire cache for its use - a significant performance boost when running a few tasks. In AMD's case the idle cache is inaccessible to the heavily loaded core.
The reason that makes me think that the cache is the current bottleneck is that the memory controller on the AMD chip is significantly faster than Intel's. Given that fact one would conclude that in non disk-bound applications that require large amounts of memory (games) the AMD chips would pull ahead. This is not the case. Of course there is more than just cache at play here but the fact that the Intel chips has 4 to 8 times more cache available to it has to make a fairly significant difference.
Check out my AMD FX-70 at http://amd4x4.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
However, just because AMD is losing at the top end doesn't mean every AMD system loses to intel. At work, I'm still getting Athlon64 systems because you can get A64 3500+ 512MB systems with DVI and 3 year warranties for under $600. They're plenty fast for the users and DVI connection will d
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's all about the cache... (Score:5, Informative)
This is massively important as the core 2 duo can then operate on four 32 bit floating point numbers in one clock cycle instead of two.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that's one way to look at it, another is that Intel has finally decided to unleash the flood gates on their own manufacturing and produce huge caches. Before the most recent generation of chips, Intel's desktop parts weren't sporting very big caches either. It was the Xeon MP and Itanium that were being granted gigantic caches -- I still maintain that Itanium's specfp score was mostly due to the amount of cache, since specfp 2000 should really be called spec
silly but ... (Score:3, Interesting)
AMD is just trying to get as much non-idle time out of the fab as possible before they move everything to 65nm.
It's the same reason why they make "el-cheapo sempron" parts and sell them AT A LOSS. It's better to lose a few bucks than a lot. And idle time in a fab costs a lot of money.
Tom
Re:silly but ... (Score:5, Informative)
1. They have several production lines. They make more than one CPU type at a time. They are capable of simultaneously producing/testing 65nm while making 90nm parts.
2. Idle time in a fab is a KNOWN COST HAZARD. I'm not making this up. It costs money to keep rooms clean, pay the interest on the debt, etc
3. Word on the street [when I was an AMD employee...] was the average processor cost ~60-80$ USD in raw materials/time/effort to make (assuming 100% yield). Yes, your opteron cost about the same to make (excluding yield problems) as that $50 sempron. So why make semprons if they lose money? Yes, I know I'm discounting yield which does contribute real cost to the processors. On the opteron side though, my take [personal op] was that most of the cost was to recoup the R&D not the production costs.
Point is, both AMD and Intel produce low end parts that cost money. Even in the Celeron line which they call "mistakes" (e.g. parts with broken caches) that's not entirely true and is misleading. Even if you made a defective cache, it costs more money to just throw the die out, then to package it as a celeron and sell it at a loss.
4. Intel cores are fast, but they're not the be-all. They still lack NUMA support which is handy in HPC environments (re: not your desktop). They're also not quite a strong in the ALU front (though from my crypto benchmarks are VERY VERY close).
I'm by no means an AMD fanboi. Hell, my desktop is a core2. But I still love my 2-way Opteron workstation and get it to do things that run circles around the core2 (like hosting 15 engineers running simulations/verifications/etc).
Buy what you need, not what some lame commercial on TV tells you. For many, the core2 is the best buy. It's fast, wicked low power and the cost isn't bad. For others, AMD is the better buy (cheaper) or simply more powerful (opterons).
Tom
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about it, you have a pile of costs that don't go away. You can't just lay off/rehire fab technicians on a whim. These costs don't just go away because demand for Opterons is lower o
You make incorrect assumptions (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps in order to keep good performance when communicating between caches they need to keep the number of memory addresses low so that the overhead stays low. They decided that separate caches was a better model, and they currently have to maximize performance with this design.
AMD might have favored their server market when choosing this design and separate cache works better for server machines. They may need to refine their architecture for the desktop market. Don't be so quick to accuse AMD of making cache mistakes without doing the math for find the theoretical best solution.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)