Back on September 23, 2003 a site called AMDMB did a review of the Athlon 64 FX-51 processor, which turned out to be the fastest desktop processor on the planet at the time and could handily beat Intel's offerings even with their higher clock. As Slashdot has pointed out that this is indeed the 10th year anniversary of the release of that processor they thought it would be nice to look back on a better time in AMD's history. Head to Slashdot to read through the comments and click through to ExtremeTech who have put together a retrospective.
"It's been a decade since AMD's Athlon 64 FX-51 debuted — and launched the 64-bit x86 extensions that power the desktop and laptop world today. After a year of being bludgeoned by the P4, AMD roared back with a vengeance, kicking off a brief golden age for its own products, and seizing significant market share in desktops and servers."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
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- HTC staring down the barrel of a US sales ban after Nokia's patent coup @ The Register
- Nikon Coolpix S9500 Review @ TechReviewSource
- Win a Titanic £2,000 gaming system with PCSpecialist and Kitguru
If only AMD could go back to
If only AMD could go back to focusing on IPC instead of going back to the GHz race and marketing gimmicks.
The current gen of FX CPU’s use the worst of the marketing gimmicks, claiming 8 cores but the use of shared components causes it to have the same performance hits that hyper threading has.
They need to stop what they are doing now and work on a CPU with 4-8 true cores (no detrimental sharing which causes issues like this: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/138394-amds-fx-8350-analyzed-does-piledriver-deliver-where-bulldozer-fell-short/1
(the benchmark on that site focuses on a 4 threaded test, first with all but 2 core modules disabled, then with all 4 core modules enabled (but 1 “core” in each module disabled), and finally with 4 modules and 8 “cores” and allowing the windows and any other driver enhancements and hotfixes manage the placement of the 4 threads)
On the Phenom II, mixing and matching different cores to handle 2 threads does not impact the performance, core 1 and 3 will perform the same as using core 1 and 2 or 1 and 5
On a core i7, the load on 1 core will not impact the the raw performance of another core (unless you use 1 core and it’s hyper threaded logical core)
AMD needs to leave the GHz race again, and focus on IPC, 4GHz means nothing if the 4GHz 8 pseudo “core” AMD FX CPU is losing against a quad core intel CPU that is running at a much lower clock speed. I thought AMD would realize this especially since they are targeting a market with no brand loyalty or affinity to buzz words and marketing fluff. We focus on benchmarks and other quantifiable measurements of how the part will perform and meet out needs.
still such a shame that
still such a shame that business practices of the past really did torpedo much of AMD’s successes.
I did not purchase the fx51 (did not go to 940) but purchased later FX chips including the FX62. So I understand the pain when we saw the Bulldozer chips released as FX chips and perform badly.
Especially since AMD knew already they would not be the FX chips of old.
unfortunately it appears that AMD is leaving this arena behind and going APU only – so the days of the FX chip died with the FX 62 and for performance we old AMD’ers need to look to Intel