AMD Athlon 64 4000+ & FX-55: A Thorough Investigation
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 19, 2004 1:04 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
As we've shown just in the final pages of this review, AMD's launch of the Athlon 64 4000+ doesn't mean all that much other than bragging rights. The justification of the rating is questionable, as is the release of the processor, since it is little more than a rebadged FX-53 with some of its overclocking appeal removed. The fact that Intel has pulled the launch of the Pentium 4 4GHz while AMD has come to market with a 2.4GHz Athlon 64 4000+ doesn't mean much, but there is little to complain about since AMD has many more attractive Athlon 64 options.
What the cancelation of Intel's 4GHz Pentium 4 does say however is that Prescott was a waste. Intel would have done a much better job of competing had 90nm been simply a die shrink and done without the architectural "enhancements" of Prescott designed to ramp up clock speeds. Granted hindsight is 20-20 and we can't blame Intel for not having that knowledge of the future, but we can say that once again, it looks like AMD made the right bet, this time with reference to their 90nm strategy. We would strongly recommend any of AMD's 90nm parts thanks to their significantly lower power consumption, competitive price as well as their performance.
It is worth noting that after the Athlon 64 3500+, AMD doesn't really have many price-competitive options with Intel. The 3800+ and 4000+ compete in a price segment that even Intel's Pentium 4 560 won't touch, making Intel's flagship desktop processor cheaper than AMD's similar offering - a first if we've ever seen one. So although the Athlon 64 3800+ and 4000+ are very strong performers, you're definitely paying for them. Although it is worth noting that even the FX-55 is cheaper than Intel's Pentium 4 3.4EE.
The introduction of the FX-55 with strained silicon technology is an interesting and unexpected move from AMD, at least at this point. We knew they were planning an FX-55, but we had no idea it would include strained silicon support - the question of when we'll see strained silicon and higher clock speeds at 90nm does still remain.
With 2004 quickly coming to a close, we can't help but wonder if this will be the last year for the foreseeable future where we will have a processor speed war to talk about. With 2005 destined to be the year of multiple cores, and with dual core solutions from both AMD and Intel guaranteed to run at lower clock speeds than present day single core chips, are the great MHz and GHz races of years past on hiatus for a while?
What about software support for multi core processors? Although Intel has happily shipped over 50 million Hyper Threading enabled Pentium 4s in just over two years, the vast majority of desktop applications are still not multithreaded. Will the introduction of dual core CPUs be a clever way of weaning the populous off of fast CPUs so that lower clocked, slower overall, multi core CPUs can tide us over until performance actually improves? The prospects are interesting.
We expected Intel to launch Hyper Threading with killer applications and benchmarks that would truly show its necessity on the desktop, but we were rather surprised to see that the best we got two years ago were some scripts that simulated isolated situations. Our fears are that 2005 will hold a repeat of Intel's HT launch on the desktop; while no one is arguing that dual core won't have a future, we're wondering if it may come a bit too soon to actually do anything. Obviously only time will tell, but until then don't expect too many more speed bumps from either Intel or AMD. It seems like both camps are going to be increasing cache sizes and playing with other architectural tweaks in the near future before they can get dual core out the door.
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southernpac - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
It has been reported elsewhere that the FX55 runs 15 degrees hotter than the 4000+, and that Cool & Quiet are available on both. True? Also, does the new AMD stock fan (with the copper fins and heat pipe) come with the 4000+?ThePlagiarmaster - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
Val,Sounds like you don't know how to build a PC properly. With a good PSU and QUALITY memory (corsair, kingston, crucial etc) you won't experience any problems with AMD systems (with any motherboard). If you still experience problems turn off that damned SPD. Config the memory yourself and problems go away. I don't even use SPD's when setting up customers PC's these days. If there is a way to turn it off and config the memory myself it's the first thing I do.
All SPD's are not created equal (nor are PSU's). Tons of them out there will make your machine run like crap. A simple fix is to kill it and config the memory yourself in the bios.
Learn to read forums and how to troubleshoot your PC.
Plag
nastyemu25 - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
what the hell did val just say?Philbill - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
Sounds to me as though the Intel fanboys are worried :)val - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
53: yes and Acer on all their notebooks and servers :-). And Britney never touched Sprite. Please try to discover what PR means. Google will help ya.val - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
51: to your 820 and other sarcastic notes, everybody makes mistakes, but with intel you have allways choice. If you dont like to buy intel chipset with limited warranty with purpose to be used on cheapest office PCs, you can buy workstation or server based chipset . But what you can choose for AMD? Is there any high durable VIA chipset? Or nvidia, SIS? Dont make me smile.(note: i have 820 in my HTPC and since installed it runs fine)
Sunbird - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
Ferrari uses AMD..... Word!val - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
51: that AMD madness will end one time, and AMD chips (and specialy chipsets for AMD) have not one bug - there is one difference: intel is serious respected company, which doesnt depend on how few overclockers will like or dislike them. They must publish the bugs for this reason. AMD is not publishing any, even that stupid one with JPEG was hidden under carpet as much as was possible. And should we discuss chipsets for AMD now? Like VIA deleting harddrive with ATI card, and many others?Reason why many of them are not scared to install AMD servers is, that demand is not so high. If you have single purpose server with backup, you can run it even on ATA drives and ALI chipset to reach 99.3%.
Name me one company which prefers AMD and doesnt produce intel, name me one industrial computer who support AMDs, one automotive rack test system provider, hospital equipment, avionic systems, and so on. Its not like that few overclockers will not see their page for a ten minutes, its about lifes and lot lot of moneys. And trust me, its not about marketing or idiocy, its about quality and support what you will never get from AMD/taiwan.
Get Intel, and dont fall to temporaly madness.
I know that Hyundai is popular now, but it is not BMW (even when you can get three hyundais for one BMW and even when one is able to drive on straight road same top speed). Respected companies doesnt change so fast.
About benchmarks? I like to see once, where is compared how many interupts and system calls is CPU able to handle. Benchmark with network and soundcard, mouse, keyboard and other utilization. You will be surprised.
Zebo - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
#49 like to spread FUD much? Total BS. That's why Anands, you know the guy who reviews hardware professionally seeing thousands of products a year, been using AMD servers for four years now, right because thier unreliable?? IMO ihere is actually no more effective endorsement of the stability and reliability of AMD platforms than the fact that AnandTech uses them as the sole platform for the web serving of its main site.Need we bring up intels i820, grantsdale, alterwood disasters? Even the prescott has 31 bugs which will blue screen your comp under certain sofware instances. Thus far opteron/A64 has one. Hav'nt you heard about intel recalling processors? Hav'nt you heard about Northwood sudden death syndrome? Hav'nt you heard about HP Recall Thousands of pentium Notebooks for chipset problems?
If there's any instability to be had it's with Intel simply because AMD "offloads" about 80% of a chipsets work to the CPU's interated mem controller now.
Those "AMD bad chipset" museings were all FUD way back when too. No need to rehash them, I will if you want. But Just look what Intel man, TOM's hardware says way back then. http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q1/010122/...
"The most important finding was the enjoyable fact that each of the tested boards ran 100% stable even at the fastest possible memory timing settings. VIA's upcoming DDR chipsets may not look too impressive right now, but the Apollo KT133A is a matured, fast and solid product that offers good performance."
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001017/athlo...
"AMD Processors are significantly less expensive than Intel processors although they are at least on par in terms of performance. - FACT"
"AMD processors are incompatible. - LIE
Not that the average guy who just heard that phrase would know what the heck 'incompatible' is, but it sounds really bad, doesn't it? Well, even the people who do know that 'incompatible' means that a product wouldn't work reliably with other components (which of course is bad) are wrong if they accuse AMD's Athlon or Duron processors of it. In our labs we are testing all kinds of Athlon platforms with all kinds of different components and I can definitely say that I cannot see any difference between the compatibility of AMD products and platforms compared to the same from Intel."
"Chipsets for AMD processors are inferior to Intel chipsets. - LIE
Yeah, sure, the earth is flat and politicians are honest ... I am still amused when I see people posting the above message in news groups or as their response to articles. How many more times does Intel need to screw up their chipsets (i820, MTH, ...) until you guys get the message? . . . Incompatibilities are more a problem of the motherboard BIOS than of the chipset right now. Thus both chipset makers, Intel as well as VIA, are actually in the same situation."
Stop the hate budda. Get AMD, everyones doing it.:)
val - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
also should the countries to do something with AMD/Intel NVIDIA/ATI cartels. CPU / GC costs so much more than whole mainboard. Thats crazy. More competitors to the battlefield or some kind of regulation is needed.