The Chip That Changed the World: AMD's 64-bit FX-51, Ten Years Later 259
Dputiger writes "It's been a decade since AMD's Athlon 64 FX-51 debuted — and launched the 64-bit x86 extensions that power the desktop and laptop world today. After a year of being bludgeoned by the P4, AMD roared back with a vengeance, kicking off a brief golden age for its own products, and seizing significant market share in desktops and servers."
Although the Opteron was around before, it cost a pretty penny. I'm not sure it's fair to say that the P4 was really bludgeoning the Athlon XP though (higher clock speeds, but NetBurst is everyone's favorite Intel microarchitecture to hate). Check out the Athlon 64 FX review roundup from 2003.
The old days (Score:5, Insightful)
Those were the good old days. How I miss when it took me one day at most to learn about all options I had to build a gaming computer, with enough detail to make an informed decision about what bits and pieces to built it with.
Nowadays just piercing the veil of lies, half truths, false reports and bought reviews, makes the entire process incredibly boring and frustrating.
Made me miss the old Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The old days (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Before AMD committed suicide (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD is very competitive for many-cores workloads. To get an equivalent core count on Intel can be as much as a second AMD system. AMD has gone more wide, Intel has gone more deep. Both have their applications.
Re:The old days (Score:5, Insightful)
The good old days was the 286 era, when all you needed to know what the clock speed of the CPU, EGA was four times better than CGA and SoundBlaster was AdLib compatible.
Of course, you had to deal with XMS and EMS memory settings, loading your mouse driver into high memory and solving IRQ and DMA conflicts between your ISA add-on cards.
Screw that, the good old days are today. Take out the iMac from the box, plug it in the wall socket and start using it right away.
10 years later and applications are still 32bit. (Score:4, Insightful)
10 years later and we're still running games and applications that are 32bit that only use a single core.
Re:Made me miss the old Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah like the hot grits down your pants, Natalie Portman naked and petrified, gay niggers association, penis bird registrations in ASCI, and of course who could have forgotten Goatse I mean LITERALLY forget! Ahoot one goatse troll had a +3 and got +90 responses with MY EYES?!! By a moderator trying to be funny.
No I dont miss those days as we tend to remember only the good ones
Re:Before AMD committed suicide (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell that to Tomshardware and others who use x87 benchmarks and games like skyrim showing an AMD 8 core being handed a smackdown by an i3?
No one believes in AMD anymore
Still better IMHO (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Before AMD committed suicide (Score:5, Insightful)
For games sure, but there are lots of workloads that are not games.
Re:Before AMD committed suicide (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Before AMD committed suicide (Score:5, Insightful)
The spec benchmarks tell a different story, and tend to be more representative because each vendor does their best rather than intel/nvidia providing "free" performance enhancement advice for game companies.
So, from my own experience the Amd/Intel story is a lot closer than some of these benchmarks might lead you to believe. Especially for server applications.
Its pretty easy with modern CPU's to make fairly small tweaks that give advantage to one CPU or another. We have a bunch of microbenchmarks for our application, and things like memcpy performance can be swung 2x-4x. Or even the depth of loop unrolling for some things. In one loop the intel it may like 2x and the AMD like 4x unroll. With each one tuned to run best on the platform the bottom line performance is often quite similar, but run the AMD optimized one on the intel, or the reverse and suddenly one or the other CPU appears to be trouncing the other.
Bechmark what people use? Which people? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, most benchmarks are some synthetic benchmarks (compiled with Intel compiler), or some 3D games, or some video transcoding. I do none of that, and what I do I do not do it on Windows. I am yet to see a site that benchmarks Java compilers, Java IDEs, databases, application or Java web servers, etc. on Intel vs AMD vs ARM platforms on Linux. The only site that comes close is Phoronix. And if you look at their Linux benchmarks, difference between AMD and Intel CPUs is much less than on Anandtech or Toms Hardware. Intel is still making faster CPUs, but not that much faster.
--Coder
Re:Still better IMHO (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still better IMHO (Score:4, Insightful)
See, this is why I asked. Looking at benchmark lists (things like Cinebench) would lead me to believe that this is nowhere near the case, with the fastest AMD chip (with a 4.4GHz singlethreaded turbo vs. 3,9GHz on the fastest Intel chip in this benchmark) barely keeping up with good old 1st-gen Core i5/i7 chips.
http://www.tomshardware.de/charts/cpu-charts-2012/-01-Cinebench-11.5,3142.html [tomshardware.de]
Multithreaded workloads are a different story, of course, what with AMD having consumer octacores on the market: http://www.tomshardware.de/charts/cpu-charts-2012/-02-Cinebench-11.5,3143.html [tomshardware.de]
Re:The old days (Score:2, Insightful)
So then you start looking at AMD
Your problem is starting with Intel for a CPU, the company that thinks the only way to win a CPU benchmark is to cripple their own compiler (the best x86 compiler at the time and used in many benchmarks for this reason). It required a curt case for them to admit that the compiled binaries would cripple themselves* on any non intel CPU . Intels lack of trust into their own CPUs and their attempts to manipulate benchmarks speaks volumes
* x86 and x64 CPUs contain optional instructions and feature flags to check for their existance. Compilers generate code based on different feature sets and put all of them into the program binary. At load time the program checks against the feature flags and loads the fastest available code path for the available features or falls back to a less optimal code. Programs produced by the intel compiler do an additional check against the vendor ID hardcoded into the CPU and load the worst code path for any non Intel CPU .
Re:The old days (Score:4, Insightful)
Or you can realize that we're talking about building a *new* computer, with *new* hardware.
Which doesn't do him a lick of good if he wants the new computer to run his old $5000 data acquisition hardware that only has XP drivers. Or dozens of other pieces of hardware which may have newer versions supported by newer OS's but the price of replacement is significantly more than the computer.