|
|
Reviews Around The Web
|
Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
|
|
|
|
Monday, June 27, 2005
|
|
|
|
|
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...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
|
|