Athlon 64 3000+ details revealed

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Julio Franco

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Let's quash a few of the rumours, and set things straight. First up, the 3000+ is a Clawhammer core running at 1.8GHz with 1MB cache. Who would have thought AMD would have taken such a radical step?

The more interesting bit is the pricing. The current Athlon64 3200+ can be found for about $400 -- give or take a few. This new chip will be a little more than half that when it debuts, most likely on December 15, but that could still change by a few days. Look for the price to be less than $225 once the newness factor wears off. While this release is probably too late to affect Christmas sales much, it bodes well for 64 bit chip pricing in the new year.

Read more: The Inquirer.
 
Glad to see the Athlon64s are coming along :)

Clawhammer core running at 1.8GHz with 1MB cache. Who would have thought AMD would have taken such a radical step?

Me/I was really hoping they would be, the top P4s smash even the A64s :blackeye:

Why is AMD still using such low frequencys though? Intel have these 3GHz++ CPUs and here we have AMDs latest and greatest running at 1.8GHz :confused:
 
Just maybe the A64s don't run that well on higher clock speeds yet? :p
You have to consider that P4 is a rather mature architecture while A64 is still in its early stages. Remember when the first P4s showed up worse than PIIIs?

And when will people get it - MHz isn't everything.

Can you back your claims of P4 "smashing" Athlon 64s or Opterons with links to benchmarks or sth?
 
I'd like to see some benchmarks to back that claim Agissi. I'd like to see just what areas the P4 is so great in, and which areas the A64 is supposed to be so bad in.
If you are just talking about clock speed, then you need to remember(or learn) that clock speed means squat. cycles per second doesn't mean anything when one CPU runs faster but does less work per cycle than the other.
 
That benchmark series was very interesting. I didn't what I was expecting, either the P4EE or A64 to win. But, right now A64 is the obvious choice because of the price, no matter how high it is.

I especially liked this part:
When you consider that the enthusiast can buy a Pentium 4 2.4c, 512MB of PC3200, a name brand 865PE feature-packed mainboard for way less than the price of a Athlon64 3200+ alone, and run his system at 3GHz all day long, you have to think that all of that Athlon64 performance is simply overpriced.
Because, well, that's exactly what I did, but I got a 2.6C :D
 
Pentium 4 is probally a better selections for current prices and quality. AMD has been out of the spotlight for some time, I hope they come back soon I've missed them. :D
 
That's contradicting earlier reports of a 3000+ actually being a 512KB 2GHZ part.

Someone has actually bought one of those ( WCPUID picture below ).

WCPUID%20A64%203000.JPG


Taken from Athlon 64 3000+ specs.

As for the price argument, AMD has been having a lot of financial problems lately ( they haven't posted a quarter with a benefit in 2 years ). Everyone is glad they're here, they offer cheap parts & they force Intel to lower prices. Yet when they try to make some money ( which is their primary purpose mind you ), everyone runs off.

They're prolly selling those Athlon64 chips at a loss as it is. Under the heatspreader, the Die is HUGE. Certainly due to the 1mb of L1 cache. I certainly don't see it as beeing a profitable chip until they start making them in 0.09.
 
Originally posted by MoRulez
I've seen benchmarks where Athlon 64's lose to P4 EEs and vice versa. But if you mean "smash" as in "almost double" or as a "significant amount" I don't recall any big leads. But I just saw mainstream sites.

HardOCP has a comparision of A64 and P4EE

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTI0LDM=

Yeah I was referring to the P4 EEs beating the A64 in benchies. I shouldnt have said "smashing" because I wasnt talking about gigantic scores over the A64.

If you are just talking about clock speed, then you need to remember(or learn) that clock speed means squat. cycles per second doesn't mean anything when one CPU runs faster but does less work per cycle than the other.

No crap i know that, but its like why are they running at such low clock speeds when they could be running at 3GHz? They probably cant be running at those speeds now or else they would be for whatever reason.

What Nodsu mentioned about the early P4s being worse then the PIIIs is a good point. These A64s right now are our babys :)
 
They're not running at such high speeds because most of the architecture for the Athlon64 is taken from the original Athlon & it wasn't designed to get that high in speed. Instead they concentrated on making the CPU as efficient as possible with every clock cycle.

They also extended the pipelines to make sure the CPU performance stays up to par with the speed increase.

Apparently with their upcoming 0.09 process, they feel confident in taking this CPUs all the way to 3.5GHZ ( not 3500+ ) at least .
 
High clock speeds = high power consumption = high operating temps = lots of EMI generated = higher cost for mainboards etc.

Why would you want to have high clock speeds if you can have the same performance at lower speeds. High clock speeds are *bad*, but often they are the obvious way to increase performance for any given cpu technology.
 
Originally posted by Nic
High clock speeds = high power consumption = high operating temps = lots of EMI generated = higher cost for mainboards etc.

Why would you want to have high clock speeds if you can have the same performance at lower speeds. High clock speeds are *bad*, but often they are the obvious way to increase performance for any given cpu technology.

Bingo!!
The bottleneck for computer speed is not in the processor anyway. It is getting data to and from the processor, typically the cache / front side bus. The main reason that AMD was getting beat by the lastest P4 is do to this. Example amd had been running at 200's front bus while Intel is on 500's
 
Yes, but my point was, if they are performing this well now at 1.8GHz, imagine how fast they would be at 3GHz. Then the question well why dont they clock 'em to 3GHz in the first place.

But about clock speeds making all those problems as they go up in MHz was a very good point Nic.
 
OK for one, they are comparing a CPU thats a generation ahead to a CPU a generation behind. This A64 has 1MB+ of cache, and they are comparing the price to a normal [non-EE] P4.

.. Just proving some points on that link ;)
 
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