AMD Athlon 64 6000+ Launched And Tested 156
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."
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.
Unfortunately? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's unfortunate about it? It's just a fact.
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!
Re:Question for the AMD fans/afficianados (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Question for the AMD fans/afficianados (Score:4, Insightful)
I am still ever hopeful to see what AMD does at 45nm.
Re:Unfortunately? (Score:2, Insightful)
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]
Manufacturing != R&D (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Question for the AMD fans/afficianados (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 instance? All I can get from my local shops is the X2 3800, which while dirt cheap, is the slowest X2. Why not sell the 4800 you had for not quite as little? I'd buy that as a intermediate upgrade.
Re:It's all about the cache... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Question for the AMD fans/afficianados (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 into something which would put them back on top of either the price or performance curves?
"Better" implies either-or, which is incorrect. Obviously AMD knows they need to do something to try to get back on top, and have claimed they have that thing in the upcoming Barcelona chip. Designing such a thing takes years. So if they did 'either-or', they would have been working entirely on Barcelona for the past couple years, and in the meantime would have released zero incremental speed upgrades. Which would be disastrous for their competitive standings. So they do the obvious thing: Work on both. A design team works on the new chip, while the product development team works on squeezing more MHz out of the existing design.
Similarly, it isn't like Intel was sitting on their asses for four years while K8 kicked the Pentium 4's sorry ass around. They didn't keep releasing Pentium 4 + 200MHz because they thought that would get them the lead back. They did it because they had to keep selling parts while the multi-year effort to get their new PPro-ancestry designs was going on. In the short term, though, Pentium 4 + 200 MHz was what they could do to try to keep pace, so they did it.
Re:It's all about the cache... (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 speccache or specmem.
Anyway, Intel has the best fab tech in the industry, some of the best circuit designers, and the most fab capacity. Combine this, and it is economical for Intel to put big caches on all their parts, and they decided to start using that advantage. AMD can't afford to follow suit -- not only are their caches larger in die area for the same storage, they also don't have the capacity to produce huge chips. AMD is already fab limited.
This is why the recent IBM announcement about eDRAM is significant. AMD has a tech sharing agreement with IBM. If eDRAM is practical in AMD's 45nm process, then that could eliminate Intel's advantage in cache sizes.
Re:Why, exactly? (Score:1, Insightful)
Because the vast majority of corporate desktops are not running 3D applications, and corporate servers are more performance critical than what corporate desktops are.
Do you think that we should care about how the chip could possibly perform in a scenario that accounts for a tiny proportion of all real use(your 64-bit suggestion)
Nice troll attempt. The majority of corporate desktops are not running 3D applications, so the Sandra and 3DMark benchmarks are irrelevant, and I agree with the Grandparent post. I too would like to see a true 64bit benchmark, but also add in mail and file servers to the databases and web servers that grandparent poster mentioned. Hell, if you want to get really fancy, benchmark J2EE performance on the boxes, too.
or that perhaps we should care about the use that these chips will see the vast majority of the time(32-bit apps on a 32-bit OS)?
Try telling that to the IT director that has to maintain a system that will handle corporate email for over 5000 users - and do it quickly, while running SAP, internal J2EE apps, and other corporate applications.
With that kind of volume, the increased throughput of the 64 bit architecture becomes very compelling.
I think somehow that the latter is more useful.
Only to you. Meanwhile, adults have more important things to do than squeeze out another 3 frames per second on Call of Duty.
Re:silly but ... (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 one week compared to last.
They DO NOT make the low end processors to profit. Quite the contrary, they barely break even [if not lose money] on the deal in terms of per unit cost. Aside from re-couping some cost, they also earn business from customers who can only afford the $50 processor (which in all likelyhood is all they really need anyways). Many customers who start on the low end processors come back for another, or better yet, a higher end processor down the road.
Tom