Athlon 64 3200+ and Athlon FX51 2200mhz

Praetorian

So at long last the Athlon 64 3200+ and Athlon FX51 2200mhz have been released. Intel sort of ruined the launch by releasing the P4 Extreme. Which is basically a re-badged Xeon (2 megs extra cache).

So was it a fair move for Intel to make such cosmetic changes prior to the actual launch of the Athlon 64? We see it as the infantile reaction of a monopolist who's naturally inclined to act like a general at a sand table exercise.

You can read the full review here...

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030923/index.html

Ok so the Athlon 64 hasn't won the top performance crown as was expected. In my opinion AMD have made a massive mistake regarding the motherboard platforms; socket 743 won't be out for long, and socket 940 will be replaced by socket 939 next year.

AMD needs this processor to do well, because they have been making a loss for years...

What do you guys think?

BigEejit

www.techreport.com does a great review of the new processors ... including the 3.2Ghz P4 EE with 2MB of level 3 cache ... its neck in neck stuff

MrPinK

A couple more reviews....

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTI0

Bottom line? The Good - The Athlon64 3200+ and FX 51 deliver the best overall performance we've seen from any CPU line to date. The Bad - The Athlon64 3200+ and FX 51 are going to be overpriced for the gaming and enthusiast market. The Ugly - The Athlon64 and FX 51 will very likely not be available in any great quantity until next year...but that remains to be seen.

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000253

The Athlon 64 FX-51 is indeed the fastest desktop processor right now as the Pentium 4 EE is not really available to the enthusiast. The large L3-cache of Pentium 4 EE gives it an advantage in applications like 3D Animation, but in games the Athlon 64 FX-51 is overall the fastest processor. However, the high price tag plus the fact that you have to buy buffered RAM makes the Athlon FX-51 less interesting from a price/performance perspective.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlon64-fx51.html

So far the situation in the market looks as follows. Intel’s new CPU copes better than its AMD rival with streaming data processing and multimedia files encoding. Also, it appears quite efficient for multi-threading tasks, such as 3ds max or Photoshop. The newcomer from AMD, however, proved really fast in scientific tasks and office. If we make some additional allowances, we will be able to state its leadership over the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition even in contemporary 3D games.

http://anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1884

When it comes down to recommendations, the Athlon 64 offers very compelling performance at a much more reasonable price point than the Athlon 64 FX. We cannot recommend the FX until AMD does release a version with unbuffered memory support and we would strongly suggest waiting until the Socket-939 version is released if you are considering the FX.

What is promising however are the performance gains we saw when recompiling for 64-bit on the Athlon 64; if AMD can actually get 64-bit applications and a compatible OS from Microsoft out in the market then the recommendations become much more positive for AMD. Until then, it's wait and see, AMD has done well but execution isn't a singular task - it is continued execution that will guarantee AMD a spot at the top of the market again.

Kali

Hmm just after reading the tomshardware article from start to finish, and what a read, I've never read any review as long in a few years (since the days when aceshardware used to do 7-10 pages)... ok read, though nothing great... misses out on a few points imo.

That said, and to briefly summarize, I was shocked at how much the P4EE3.6 dominated events, as already said, it did put a large dampner on AMDs latest offerings... and in several benchmarks it actually doubles the performance of my current processor (XP2500+).. and its only a month old! (ouch).

Bear in mind also that AMDs 64FX-51 isn't that much cheaper than the P4EE3.6 either... (799 versus 849).. and neither will be readily available yet for quite a while (if AMD delay too long chances are Intel will bring out a new chip quicker and cheaper than the P4EE).

Further down the scale though, I'm impressed with the 64 3200+ .. if they can keep the price point low, this could be a good seller, and shows a decent improvement over the XP 3200+.

Might have a gander over a few of the other reviews to get a different perspective though.

CivilServant

Tomshardware do have a tendency of bias for intel based solutions. Though I'm not saying it's entirely untrue what the stats are. I find Anandtech to be useful in getting the low down on details in the most unbiased point of view. Although I do agree with reading almost all the reviews to see everyone's perspective.

I did think 64 and FX were going to crush Intel but, wily old Intel put a damper on AMDs launch with their own paper launch. P4 EE probably won't be officially launched for another few months whereas the 64 is available on american based and some european based websites now. I'll be waiting for the dual channel FX, that doesn't require ECC memory. By then hopefully 64s and FXs will be widely available and better motherboards come out... and someone has unlocked the multiplier.

MrPinK

Intel did seem to pull that P4 EE out of their arse at the very last second The FX would have put them to shame otherwise. Nice to see the Xeons reaching the desktop market. HyperThreading has a lot of potential and that monster cache is a nice addition.

Not a bad first outing for the athlon 64's though. Big improvements over the XP range. The FX put in some pretty amazing benchmarks, and the 2.4Ghz version is supposably just around the corner. As soon as the 64bit Windows arrives and the 64bit apps come out, things will really get interesting.

Kali

Originally posted by Praetorian
In my opinion AMD have made a massive mistake regarding the motherboard platforms; socket 743 won't be out for long, and socket 940 will be replaced by socket 939 next year.

Thats a very good point, Intel made the same mistake when they introduced the P4, severely hampering its initial take-up.. and its only in the last year that the P4 has made great strides both in market share and in the minds of the buyers, both technical and home users.

Praetorian

The new product range offered by AMD is also very questionable. They have released two extremely expensive processors; why didn't they just release a few more lower clocked variants?

Have a look at these sterling prices!

BabyEater

The reason's they haven't released lower variants of the Athlon64 is that they haven't the capacity to make that many chips they only seem to have their manufacturing problems fixed not too long ago so they don't have the supply. Also these chips are massive so they are expensive to make which means they can't sell them too cheaply.

MrPinK

They're gonna be very expensive because there aren't going to be that many produced for the moment. Microsoft were supposed to have sorted the new OS by now, but it's been delayed till Christmas. Once Windows 64 is released then AMD will start knocking the chips out as fast as they can and I'm sure the prices will come down. The bosses at AMD know full well that their prices are the biggest advantage they have over Intel, and aren't going to throw that away.

jesus_thats_gre

I refer to a previous thread as to the merits of the Athlon 64.... This confirms what I thought, AMD made this a 64 bit processor purely so they could say we were the first 64 bit desktop orientated processor.

The P4EE outperfroms the Athlon64 in nearly every benchmark I have seen and is priced more or less the same.

The last laugh me thinks

MrPinK

Originally posted by jesus_thats_gre
This confirms what I thought, AMD made this a 64 bit processor purely so they could say we were the first 64 bit desktop orientated processor.

AnandTech did a comparison (albeit a very short one) between some some 32Bit and 64bit versions of a couple of programmes. There was a 34% increase in performance when the Lame Mp3 encoder was recompiled to make a 64bit version. That is no small increase, 64 bit processing is definitely not a gimmick. No one else seems to done any benchmarks for the athlon running 64bit code, but hopefully we'll see some more soon.

The P4EE outperfroms the Athlon64 in nearly every benchmark I have seen and is priced more or less the same.

The last laugh me thinks

Tom's hardware seem to have gotten a faster P4EE than everyone else Most other ppl's results have the FX ahead on gaming benchmarks. Ace's Hardware even did a nice little table showing the faster chip for each game they ran. The P4EE looks like a great chip tho, such close competition is very good news for consumers.


If anyone has any more links to any reviews not listed above, pls post

astrofool

how odd for tomshardware to get different results from everyone else !

Praetorian

Tomshardware had a faster P4 EE than anyone else. Their comments were in no way pro intel though.

po0k

Don't Trust The German Dentist™

Scruff

still ye have to admit that the design of these chips is quite impressive. the fact that the intel chip has to have an extral mb of cache and be clocked 1Ghz faster to just pip the FX51 is quite something.
There's specualtion about the avaliability of the new chips as far in a Q2 04. That coupled with all the bloody different pins could be their down fall. hope not.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11758

Mutant_Fruit

please remember, nothing has yet been optimised for the athlon 64 yet. Anything specifically optimised for P4 will do better than when it runs on the AMD64. Wait for 64bit apps and properly optimised code to come out, then benchmark.

po0k

Originally posted by Mutant_Fruit
Wait for 64bit apps and properly optimised code to come out, then benchmark.

Isn't there a 64-bit A64 version of the CS and UT2003/4 servers out/due out soon (respectively)?
If you ahve the compiler, grab the source of what you want to run and compile it (eg. *n*x)

Matt Simis

For a look at how well the A64 scales, check out:

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000268


They used a Prometiea MachII super cooler to get the A64-51 upto 2.8GHz. Its very, very fast.

I should get an A64 for my prommie!



Matt