First Round of AMD Athlon 64 Reviews In

wrinkledshirt writes "Here's a bunch of AMD Athlon 64 reviews, courtesy of 8Dimensional." AcesHardware and HardOCP match the Athlon 64 line against the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. amdmb, FiringSquad, and SharkyExtreme take a closer look at the FX-51. AthlonXP and PCStats have glowing reviews of the chips. Digit-Life compares the new Athlon 64 with Opteron and a Pentium 4. LegitReviews and Overclockers.com.au also both have succinct reviews of the FX-51. Overall the reviews speak very highly of the Athlon 64 and the FX version of the chip, with the only downside being the cost, especially of the FX chip.

Re:Pentium 4 Emergency Edition

[MarcoAtWork]

while it's very likely that this is the case for the reviewing samples (probably rushed out as fast as possible, I can't believe that Intel had plans for the EE all along given that there were 0 leaks) given that this is a paper launch by the time the EE will actually be available to customers I'm sure the MP support will disappear.

Re:Memory mapped disk?

[ianezz]

You will not see consumer systems with more then 4GB any time soon

The point about mmap(2) is to let the system (the VM subsystem of the kernel) manage the caching for the userland processes using it, avoiding extra copies to/from buffers in userland and eliminating in several cases the need for custom caching code (processes don't have to worry about data being available in RAM: the kernel automatically takes care of that when needed).

You don't need gobs of memory to do this, but in order to work on large amount of data you need a large address space, which is what 64 bit architectures provide. Of course, the more physical memory you have, the less the kernel has to swap pages in and out, but the main point is not that.

A little example to clarify: in order to keep things simple (instead of needing two intermixed caching systems, one for the VM and one for disk accesses), the Hurd just mmaps the whole partition. This means that the maximum size of a partition has an upper limit given by the size of the addressing space, which is 4GB on 32bit architectures (actually less, since in that address space you have to keep also the code that uses the mmapped data, so it's more like 2GB/3GB). A 64bit architecture comes very handy here, given the current size of hard disks.

Re:Hang on..

[SD-VI]

Actually, I doubt the motherboards can be tweaked all that much. You see, usually any performance increase from motherboard tweaking comes from memory controller optimization, and the ClawHammer (Athlon 64) and SledgeHammer (Athlon 64 FX / Opteron) have an on-die memory controller. I'd look more to code optimization than motherboard revisions if I were you. This also means that the performance difference between chipsets is tiny. nForce3 will probably be very popular just because of nForce2, even though it was nForce2's robust memory controller that gave it its superb reputation). Even the ALi (shudder) chipsets will do fine.

Re:Pentium 4 Emergency Edition

[BlueBiker]

Makes ya wonder whether a company such as Powerleap [powerleap.com] might come out with a CPU adapter to support it. For a long time the Athlon MP series offered the only affordable SMP solution, especially if like me you found a pair of Athlon XPs which worked happily in SMP mode.

Athlon FX 2.8 Ghz today!

[sundling]

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000253
has a cooling technology that allowed them to overclock to a 2.8 Ghz Athlon FX. It was pretty impressive stuff, especially how well Age of Mythology did, even against the non-shipping P4 Emergency Edition.

I can't wait until theres 64 bit games for this sort of thing. Of course, the first to be released will be Unreal Tournament. Oh yahh!! I know I'll own at least one of the AMD64 computers within the next year!

I'd love to have a new AMD64 for my application server. There were benchmarks on extreme tech showing a 1.6 Ghz dual opteron beating a 2.8 Ghz quad xeon by gigantic margins (almost double). So when these Athlon 64 processors trickle down to the same clocked Opterons, it should start to shake up the server market even more. Especially given upcoming backing from Sun:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11772

Ugh...

[wicka_wicka]

Doesn't anyone realize that the Athlon 64 isn't going to be anything special until they start testing on a 64-bit platform???

Re:Hang on..

[Jeff DeMaagd]

You know, I can't disagree. Moving the memory controller must have greatly simplified the chipset design. Even the multiprocessing is greatly simplified as well as the CPUs are the ones that handle that, one may be able to use the exact same chipset for both dual and single chip board designs, possibly even quad designs. The down side is that a lot of dual CPU and definitely all new quad CPU systems need greater I/O, that which the single CPU designs rarely need, such as 64 bit PCI slots, at 66, 100 and 133 MHz speeds.