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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coolme - Monday, January 10, 2005 - link
#85 yeah, but when comparing to Tom's Hardware review, it's totally off track... (Tom's is more believeble because there is pics of how he measured it and based on the fact that there is no way a A64 could handle 200+ watts)http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041115/pentium4...
how Tom tested it: http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041115/pentium4...
eight - Monday, December 27, 2004 - link
Has anyone information about A64 performance with Premiere Pro 1.5? I assume thet A64 does beat P4, but assumption is mother of... :)euanw - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
#44Wesley,
I am very impressed by your articles. Can you inform me of the procedure you used to overclock the FX55? With the Neo2 board I am not clear on CPU vid and CPU voltage, what do they mean? When I change the multiplier to 13.5 my new PC reaches winXP and then reboots.
My setup is MSI K8N-Neo2-54G, FX-55, 2 x 512MB - OCZ EL DDR PC-3200 Platinum Rev2, Nvidia Quadro FX3000, 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120 GB, Matrox RTX-100 real time video editor, Antec TrueBlue 480W ATX-12V, BenQ DVD Dual DW1610, WinXP-SP2.
euanw - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
#44Wesley,
Gioron - Sunday, October 24, 2004 - link
While I'm unsure of the exact method used in this review, I'm sure that there is no built-in power measurement devices on the motherboards and processors listed (unless its new and no one told me...) so its NOT just just a matter of installing software that can read a sensor thats already there (as in all the CPU temp monitors). This means it requires some hardware to measure the voltage and current flow to various components (or you can cheat a little and assume the voltage is constant and just measure current).Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds, since isolating various components can be a problem. Its fairly easy to measure things like hard drive power useage since there is only one power connector going to it and its easy to access, so you measure the current on the 5v line and the current on the 12v line, and you're pretty much done. Things like CPUs, motherboards and graphics cards are a bit more difficult. On the newer graphics cards you can measure the power consumption from the additional molex connector, but in all likelyhood, the card will also draw a certain amount of power from the AGP slot power lines, and no one in their right mind is going to unsolder the AGP slot and raise it half an inch in an attempt to put a current sensor in line with the power leads. Thus, you need to rely on indirect means and educated guesses. You can measure the current going into the motherboard, but how much of that is going to the chipset, the CPU, the RAM and the graphics card? You can swap in a different CPU and see how it changes, but that won't give you absolute readings. You can try to remove the CPU and see what power the MB uses without one, but odds are it'll use more power when its actually interfacing with a CPU instead of beeping error codes at you.
Bottom line: There is no easy way to measure power consumption, and even dedicated hardware review sites have problems with it. Personally, I trust Anand far enough that I'm sure he didn't completely screw it up, and the numbers he has are probably close enough to the real thing. I'd forget about measuring power for myself.
xsilver - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Kinda late on the comments but..If anand or anybody can answer -- what is used to measure the "power consumption" software? or hardware? links? I would like to test this myselfthanks
Bakwetu - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Whoah, it's been a while since I checked out cpu reviews and I must say Amd has some impressive cpu:s nowadays. Even though I am budget oriented when it comes to buying hardare, I'd choose the 3400+ model before the 3200+, it's not all that much more expensive and seems to perform much bettert - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
79uhuh.... and in a server type situation, how many raid arrays are ran off the chipset controllers? not many i would wager..
hell... u prolly have an independent fibre optic raid array :)
hardware, baby, hardware.
t.
knitecrow - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
I always knew women were trouble when it comes to technology ;)screech - Thursday, October 21, 2004 - link
nice ones #79, 78. :)