It's up.
We only had one board and one set of processors from AMD for this article, so of course they first went up to Jason in Canada for the server tests. He had them for about a week then sent them down to me for the desktop tests. I struggled with some board issues and eventually got the hardware down to Derek for his workstation look. Unfortunately he had some issues getting his Intel workstation platform up and running so the workstation performance numbers will have to wait for another article.
At the end of the day I was very impressed with the performance of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 as well as the Opteron dual core solutions, my main issue is price. Intel is really playing the role of driving the market here, since developers won't multithread their applications unless a large installed user base of multi-core/multiprocessor systems exist and Intel's pricing is the only thing that will drive that sort of mass adoption of dual core. So while we always criticize Intel and haven't been happy with their architecture in years, the industry needs Intel to make sure that by the time '06 and '07 roll around - we'll be playing multithreaded games in a more multi-core friendly OS with tons of multithreaded applications running in the background.
I do sincerely hope that the X2 4200+ and 4400+ will be available in reasonable quantities by the end of the year because they are the only hope for getting any sort of somewhat reasonably priced dual core CPUs out of AMD.
We only had one board and one set of processors from AMD for this article, so of course they first went up to Jason in Canada for the server tests. He had them for about a week then sent them down to me for the desktop tests. I struggled with some board issues and eventually got the hardware down to Derek for his workstation look. Unfortunately he had some issues getting his Intel workstation platform up and running so the workstation performance numbers will have to wait for another article.
At the end of the day I was very impressed with the performance of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 as well as the Opteron dual core solutions, my main issue is price. Intel is really playing the role of driving the market here, since developers won't multithread their applications unless a large installed user base of multi-core/multiprocessor systems exist and Intel's pricing is the only thing that will drive that sort of mass adoption of dual core. So while we always criticize Intel and haven't been happy with their architecture in years, the industry needs Intel to make sure that by the time '06 and '07 roll around - we'll be playing multithreaded games in a more multi-core friendly OS with tons of multithreaded applications running in the background.
I do sincerely hope that the X2 4200+ and 4400+ will be available in reasonable quantities by the end of the year because they are the only hope for getting any sort of somewhat reasonably priced dual core CPUs out of AMD.
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raja - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Great Work!! and really fast too .. i thought it would two days for the review to be out. One suggestion it was nice to see the single core athlon offerings being included thanks to AMD's marketing. I mean the Pentium D being compared with the athlon64 3800+ and 4000+ .. but since these single core amds are also pitted against higher clocked single core pentiums it would be nice if you could add the benchmarks for single core pentium offerings like the 660 or 570 and the EE chips. It would be nice to compare the fastest single-core pentiums against the dual-cores too. Especially in the encoding section where the dual-core pentiums are limited by clock speed.crtfanboy - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Even if it was alot of work, it sure was worth it. Great article.All in all, I think you couldn't ask for things to be better. Intel did all they could with their archtecture, it's great they're pricing them so cheap. AMD did all they could with their manufacturing and came out with some great CPUs.
Most important for me is that I have a good reason to wait to upgrade (other than the painful lack of money).
CKD - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
I was looking for some information about power consumption and heat issues with these dual core CPUs. Please do a writeup on power requirements and heat issues of dual core CPUs vis-a-vis the AMD64 ones (various cores, if possible).ksherman - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Wonder how complicated OCing a dual 64 will be... single CPU's are complicated enough...Mark - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Are there plans to look at Home theater boxes?Insomniac - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Are there plans to look at overclocking performance?