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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val - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
for me is AMD unacceptable until there are good chipsets. All i have ever seen or had in my computers was big garbage with permanent problems and mysterious difficulties.Even SIS chipsets looks much better for intel than SIS for AMD. Its not anymore about CPU, CPU are fast for many tasks and that few percent of price or performance makes no deal, but overall quality talks strongly for Intel.
Save your time AMD fanboys to reply me something like that your AMD platform runs perfect and you had problems with intel and so on, its cheap and cannot anyway motivate me for change.
And yes, i have 2 AMD and 2 Intel computers and many i had or seen before (at home, work, school, projects, customers).
Gnoad - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
3GHZ! Wow, I already was an AMD fan, but that just totally blows me away. Crazy stuff.GoHAnSoN - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
nice article. Thxcoldpower27 - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Very nice, I await the day AMD releases a 3GHZ Athlon 64. These processor are niced but priced in a range where volumes are rather low, they have nice bragging rights though :PDa DvD - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
3GHz on air :SAMD's really out of trouble for the coming year(s)
I can imagine K8@90nm scaling well beyond 3GHz...
(lol, or even top Prescott clockspeeds? That would be insane..)
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
#30 and #43 -Once AMD informed us that strained silicon was used in the FX55 I couldn't resist a bit of a run with overclocking the FX55. The nForce4 Reference boad is not really intended or designed for overclocking, since it doesn't have any CPU or memory voltage adjustments. However it does support a wide range of multipliers so I could try a few settinngs.
I had no probelm at all running at 14.5X or 2.9GHz at default voltage. At that speed I ran quite a few benchmarks and a Quake 3 of 604.2 FPS. The FX55 actually booted at 3.0GHz but it never made it through a stable XP boot. I suspect with just a bit of CPU voltage 3.0GHz would be possible with the FX55 on air. All cooling was just the new AMD stock fan which now includes copper fins and heat pipes.
verybusy - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
There is some FX55 and 4000+ overclocking info at http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?page=2&...Assuming that my request from above is granted regarding other overclocking of 3500+, 3200+ and 3000+, I'd like to see just how overclocking turns out with the retail heatsink and fan. I hope that's not too much of a request.
Thanks...
verybusy - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I liked the review of the Athlon 64 4000+ and FX-55 and it was nice to see it compared to the other Athlon 64 3200+ and 3000+ processors running at stock speeds.Unfortulately, with this review following so closely behind the 3500+ and 3000+ review (.09 Athlon 64: Value, Speed and Overclocking), it would have been very useful to see the 3500+, 3200+ and 3000+ overclocked to 2.6GHz as well. Afterall, the .09 3500+/3000+ @290x9 is faster than the FX53 (2.4GHz-1MB) err I mean Athlon 64 4000+). The overclocked 3500+, 3200+ and 3000+ could be pretty much as quick as the FX55 couldn't it?
That's what I want to see anyway.
ViRGE - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
#39, Anand mentions that it's multiplier locked.Zebo - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Guys the 3400 newcastle is a way underated chip. It should have been, by all rights, called a 3600. I guess they did'nt want the 3500 to look bad agains a "old" 754 newcastle though.As for the review, total AMD performance domination at low relative speeds temps and power consumption.:) Youd have to be a fool to buy intels netburst crap right now.