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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Wednesday, August 24, 2005
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Although the AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 is fast, there are still certain areas that could be further improved. While AMD's Athlon 64 core is known to be fantastic at integer performance, it still fell prey to certain applications that depend a lot on the processor's floating-point performance. Applications such as video encoding and certain Internet Content Creation applications did not really benefit much with the Athlon 64 FX-57. However, much of its shortcomings on floating point were fortunately made up with its superior integer performance...
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Friday, August 12, 2005
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The 3800+ actually differs from the previous 'Toledo' X2 in that it's based on what AMD internally calls the 'Manchester' core. This means that it's been designed from the ground up to have only 512kb of Level 2 cache. With less cache and a lower clock on a 0.9mm Silicon-on-Insulator manufacturing process, the die size is down to 147mm with 154 million transistors, compared to 199mm and 233.2 million transistors on the 4800+. That makes it a lot easier to produce in high quantities from the fabs, which helps keep the costs down. It also brings down the maximum thermal power rating down to 89W compared to the 4800+'s 110W...
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Sunday, August 7, 2005
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Overall, the performance of the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ is outstanding and what you're really getting is a 'dualie' packed into a single silicon die. AMD's Direct Connect Architecture is well implemented in the Athlon 64 X2 processor, giving it surprisingly good scalability. Users would normally expect dual core processors to give them two times the performance, and with the Athlon 64 X2, users are actually getting performance that's nearly double. Of course, applications must first be threaded in order to take advantage of the dual-core architecture and its scalability is also quite dependent on the nature of the software...
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Thursday, August 4, 2005
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Faced with tough competition from Intel, AMD has enabled 64-bit functionality and SSE3 on its entry level processors, starting with the 3400+. If this is enough for AMD to gain more market share only time will tell, but extra functionality is always welcome...
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Monday, August 1, 2005
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With AMD's entry level dual core processor costing more than double that of Intel's, many consumers simply can't afford AMD's Athlon 64 X2 processors. All that changes today with the release of the AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor. The new X2 3800+ comes at a value packed price tag of $354 US on the day it launches and it will of course go down as the market settles down after the launch...
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Monday, June 27, 2005
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The core of the FX-57 is the 90nm San Diego rather than the 130nm Clawhammer used for the FX-53 and FX-55, although you'll also find some San Diego FX-55 processors on sale. San Diego is also used in the Athlon 64 3700+ and 4000+ models which have 1MB of L2 cache compared to the 512KB of the Venice core that is currently flavour of the month. Both Venice and San Diego use a silicon-on-insulator process and support the SSE3 instruction set. Intel has long led the way with SSE and while it seems to bring minimal benefit in the real world it can't do AMD any harm to add this feature to its processors...
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San Diego brings SSE3 support to Athlon 64 FX for the first time, along with support for mismatched DIMM sizes in its memory controller, more efficient use of memory compared to Clawhammer and more performance from its data prefetcher, which pulls data out of system memory into the processor's caches, in advance of it being needed. A lower supply voltage likely means a BIOS update for the majority of boards and board vendors will likely roll in FX-57 BIOS support with their Venice and Toledo 90nm changes. Basically a Clawhammer at 2800MHz with SSE3 and some memory controller and prefetcher tweaks, using around eight million more transistors to get there.
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The FX-57 is based on the new 90nm based San Diego Core that adds SSE3 instructions to AMD CPUs. The speed of this CPU is 2800MHz which is reached by using a multiplier of 14X with a 200MHz HTT. As with all FX series CPUs, the L2 cache is 1MB in size. While there's no denying that the FX-57 is the fastest solution for games and everyday use applications that still rely very much on the single CPU, we feel that it wont be too long before most applications will utilize dual core or multiple CPUs and thus we would recommend the dual core AMD X2 CPU over the FX any day as we feel it has much brighter future.
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Friday, June 3, 2005
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If you've already got a decent S939 motherboard on your hands it would be almost criminal not to try an Athlon 64 3000+ E3-stepping CPU. Sure, it's not hugely fast at default speeds, but I'd be amazed if 2.5GHz wasn't a given and 3GHz on the cards with better cooling. There's just something rather naughty but nice about 50% overclocks with near-default voltage. For once, you can have your cake and eat it! Yum.
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Monday, May 9, 2005
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The key things to take from today's look at the 4800+ is that it's generally no slower, but generally no faster either, than an FX-53 in single-threaded tests, yet it'll cost you a fair bit more. I hope it's obvious that a dual-core processors benefits lie elsewhere, with multi-threaded applications and real-world operating system usage. Think HyperThreading.
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There's no doubt that the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ is very impressive indeed. Combined with the nForce4 SLI chipset it has performance that is truly staggering, and the only possible source of disappointment is the price. That and the fact that we don't expect speed increases to come along thick and fast. We'd guess that 2.6GHz at the start of 2006 and 2.8GHz at the end of 2006 with a 3GHz version in 2007 is close to the mark. We're about to be hit by a wave of new technologies as 64-bit computing and virtualisation come to the desktop, and we can't wait to see what benefits they bring, but right now Athlon 64 X2 is at the top of our IT shopping list.
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Thursday, April 21, 2005
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The release today of AMD's dual-core workstation and server parts is a significant landmark in the world of x86 computing for the enterprise and professional users. The ability to pack twice the processing power into the same space opens up new doors for clustering, research, data processing, data mining, webserving, content creation, digital media production, video editing, games development and much more. While the cost is high for the time being, economies of scale and a pervasive range of processors to choose from will only bring the price down, and significantly so.
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When you consider that Microsoft et al have announced that they will charge for software licenses by the processor socket, rather than by the processor core, then it's clear that dual core processors are the way forward in the next couple of years. Faced with a stack of single core Opteron racks that spend at least part of their time pegged to 100 per cent usage, it is hard to imagine an IT manager who wouldn't be won over by the ease of upgrade to a dual core Opteron environment. Flash the BIOS, change the CPUs, start it up and you're done...
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Wednesday, March 30, 2005
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While the Athlon64 3500+ at stock speed is already pretty darn fast, with the chip clocked at 2.66 GHz it produced a very healthy speed boost in every benchmark application I ran. The Prometeia cooled Athlon64 3500+ at 3.05 GHz was blazingly fast, and it simply flies through benchmarks! 28 seconds in Super Pi's 1 million digit test is excellent and we also broke the 30k barrier in 3DMark2001 with the videocard at stock speed!
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Tuesday, March 22, 2005
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The Athlon64 3800+ uses an organic FCPGA packaging as opposed to the ceramic found on Athlon64 FX chips. From the top, the Athlon64 3800+ looks identical to the Athlon64 3200+. On the bottom of the processor, it is simply filled with pins, although this shouldn't be a surprise considering the amount of pins in the new socket 939 package.
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