AMD Athlon 64 FX-57: The Fastest Single Core
by Derek Wilson on June 27, 2005 11:47 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Introduction
AMD is increasing the speed of their highest performing CPU today. The Athlon FX-57 is a 200MHz bump from the current FX-55, brining the clock speed of the highest performing single core CPU on the market to 2.8GHz. This modest 7.7% increase is not the be all, end all of speed bumps, but AMD is still in a much better position than Intel for extracting performance by tacking on an extra 200MHz. Intel's successive 200MHz increases on Prescott since it's existence have increased performance by smaller and smaller amounts 2.8 GHz to 3.8 GHz is a 35.7% increase in clock speed, which should be an overestimate of performance barring cache size increases. If we look at AMD's performance improvements from 1.8 GHz to 2.8 GHz, the upper bound on our performance increase is greater than 55%, plus any improvement for doubling cache size.Performance doesn't scale exactly linearly with clock speed in most cases, but the bottom line is that K8 started out faster than Prescott at a lower clock speeds. The result of the speed increases on current generation CPUs has been an increasing performance gap between Intel and AMD in favor of AMD. Even in the benchmarks where AMD's architecture traditionally loses to Intel, the gap is either decreased or the outcome has changed all together. There just isn't any way Intel's current architecture can compete in single threaded performance on the high end.
But as we have mentioned time and time again, steadily increasing clock speed over time is a losing proposition. The future of computing performance must increasingly rely on architectural enhancements. The first incarnation of this outlook has been the introduction dual core processors. This first generation shows some promising numbers in many areas, but a single thread's maximum performance won't increase with the addition of cores. The result of this fact is that those who demand extremely high performance will still demand high end single core processors.
While the focus of the industry is clearly elsewhere, both AMD and Intel still need to cater to the current state of the market. The FX-57 is very expensive and comes in at a whopping $1031 (in quantities of 1000 from AMD). While this is the fastest processor on the market, let's take a look at the benchmarks to see how much we get for the money.
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fishbits - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
"Why are you still doing Mozilla 1.4 testing?"Because this is a CPU review, and they already have a slew of other CPUs tested with Mozilla 1.4? Did you think they retested it on every chip each time they got a new chip in? This keeps it apples-to-apples so we can see the relative performance of the new contender against ones who've already been benchmarked.
Or was there a specific score you needed to see for a specific version of Firefox to make or break your personal decision on whether to buy the FX-57 or not?
AnandTech: Please continue to isolate the performance of the item being reviewed as much as practical. Last thing we need is extra hardware and software variables thrown in, until you're ready to move the whole gaggle over to a new set of yardsticks.
ravedave - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
Good straight forward article. Not much text though, expect your avg page view times to be tiny.What happened to all the suggestions people gave
when Anand asked for tests for this article in his blog? Comon it's a speedbump, do something interesting.At least provide some slow old processor in the rankings so we can all laugh and point.
Backslider - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
With Half-Life 2 being the most CPU dependant game, I was suprised to see it missing from the benches.acejj26 - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
Let me be the first to offer my services as an editor for articles here. I hate seeing articles here marred by poor grammar, spelling errors, and errors in the graphs.Kocur - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
blckgrffn,Yes, you are right that DDR400 low latency will be better than DDR500 with very relaxed timings. However, you can buy now DDR memory with really nice timings at PC4000 speeds. See the memory tests at Anandtech and how much does FX53 gain from faster memory speeds at reasonable timings:). The same would hold for FX57 even to greater extent.
Moreover, I think that FX57 should have been tested on a really good, mature platform, for example, DFI LP. You cannot use some crapy reference mobo until the socket 939 dies.
Kocur.
Tallon - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
My god, my eyes are fucking bleeding.Losing: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=losing
Loosing: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=loosing
Please learn the difference.
blckgrffn - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
Dear lord! Do you know nothing of A64's and latency! DDR400 LL will stomp DDR500 @ relaxed timings, no problem! Further more, the baseline needs to stay the same, so they can't switch mobo and ram for every review.Next, mozilla 1.4 ~ Firefox. It is MOZILLA FIREFOX. Let's use our brain for that one, in that paragraph you said didn't make anysense, he laid it out for you.
I do have one gripe - how can everything be slower at UT2k4 than Doom3? Tell me that was 1600*1200 w/aa&af! Otherwise, that benchmark should have much higher scores, imho....
Other than that and that weird fluke where the 57 lost to the 55 and 4000+, thanks for the great article, Derek :)
Kocur - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
johnsonx,Well, it actually might be correct. Remember that they are using for this test the first old reference motherboard they got with FX55 last year. Thus, the results for other AMD processors come from October last year (well, at least for FX55). At that time they might have used another hard disk.
Look also at the wierd results of P4 670 in some office tests with regard to other Intel processors. This is clearly disk/controller issue.
Kocur.
DrMrLordX - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
Agreed #16, it's odd that the FX-55 and 4000+ win the Communication Sysmark 2004 bench. The FX-57 should have taken it easily.johnsonx - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
It seems a bit odd that the FX-57 looses to the FX-55 and 4000+ in the third benchmark.... perhaps the labels are mixed up?