AMD's Quad FX: Technically Quad Core
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 30, 2006 1:16 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
How does a 3GHz Athlon 64 X2 Perform?
Although today's story is mostly about AMD's Quad FX platform, there is a little gem worth mentioning. AMD's top of the line Athlon 64 FX-74 processors run at 3.0GHz, the highest shipping frequency of any AMD desktop CPU. While it won't be until next year before we see 3.0GHz in an Athlon 64 X2, we were curious to get a little preview of what the dual core race would look like early next year. Note that many of these tests are using updated benchmarks using newer versions of our applications and thus can't be compared to previous results.
The showdown is between the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (3.0GHz, 1MB L2 per core) and the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz, 4MB L2):
Intel still has the performance advantage, even once AMD reaches 3.0GHz. We didn't expect another 200MHz to do much but it's further confirmation that AMD will need a new architecture to compete; the second half of 2007 can't come quickly enough for AMD.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
88 Comments
View All Comments
BikeDude - Tuesday, December 5, 2006 - link
Could the reason be that 1GB per memory node is simply too little?On a configuration like this, you'll easily see one of the nodes with only 256MB or so left...
So, put in some more memory! At this point 32-bit XP will be limiting, even for 32-bit apps. (XP won't address more than 2^32 Bytes, some of this will be masked by PCI and PCIe devices, and additionally each process only has a 2GB address space for code&data unless you upgrade to 64-bit Windows) Also be aware that nVidia ForceWare 80.00 and newer lost PAE support. You'll experience crashes and non-working games if combined with a PAE aware 32-bit OS (such as Win2003). ForceWare 79.11 works fine though.
(BTW: MSFT added NUMA support in XP SP2)
Kiijibari - Saturday, December 2, 2006 - link
Hi Ananand,sounds credible, because there is some extra cache snooping traffic going on, anyways, please keep us posted if there is a new BIOS version available, and if it would "do" something :)
Windows schweduler differences between XP and VISTA would be interesting, too.
So far there were only Win32 XP vs. Win Vista64 comparisions, not possible to draw a fair conclusion with that data.
Thanks a lot
Kiijibari
mino - Friday, December 1, 2006 - link
One important question:Are those new FX-7x CPU identical or is there some differentiation employed ???
Kiijibari - Saturday, December 2, 2006 - link
identical to what ?If you meant Socket-F Opterons, then yes, they are identical, if the BIOS allows it, then normal Opterons should be able to run in 4x4 boards, too.
cheers
Kiijibari
mino - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
Thanks that info(if correct) pretty much clears the FUD.Griswold - Saturday, December 2, 2006 - link
How so? The 2P+ Opteron IMC wants buffered RAM, while these FX types do not. I dont think a simple BIOS hack can circumvent that.Kiijibari - Saturday, December 2, 2006 - link
*gasp*Du you really think AMD engineers, tests, validate, etc. a CPU for a niche market ??
There are maybe only a few thousand 4x4 CPUs, that are sold worldwide per month ... it would be economical ridiculous.
But if you dont know anything about business, maybe that will convince you:
http://www.aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?i...">http://www.aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?i...
cheers
Kiijibari
lollichop - Sunday, February 26, 2017 - link
All idiots talking about old CPUs here :D Fast forward 11 years, Ryzen will be out in a week's time.