Tech-report's Scott Wasson has posted an editorial that looks at what the Athlon 64 needs to do to succeed! Here's a byte.
Now that we've seen AMD's next-generation Hammer chip (now known as AMD64) up close, with real benchmarks, we have a much clearer sense of how the new AMD chips stack up against the competition from Intel. Judging by the benchmarks, Hammer has loads of potential, and it's easy to see why AMD elected to go ahead and release a server version of the chip. The architecture, with an integrated memory controller on each CPU and high-speed HyperTransport links between system devices, is brilliant for a server platform. However, the Opteron's performance in workstation-class applications seems a little shaky versus the Pentium 4 and Xeon. No doubt an Athlon 64 chip, in the form we expect it, would have trouble matching up against the Pentium 4 3GHz/875P chipset combo we tested recently. By this fall, Intel will be hawking processors based on the Prescott core, built on Intel's 90-nanometer fab process and rumored to have a longer pipeline and a larger cache.
What The Athlon 64 Needs To Succeed
Now that we've seen AMD's next-generation Hammer chip (now known as AMD64) up close, with real benchmarks, we have a much clearer sense of how the new AMD chips stack up against the competition from Intel. Judging by the benchmarks, Hammer has loads of potential, and it's easy to see why AMD elected to go ahead and release a server version of the chip. The architecture, with an integrated memory controller on each CPU and high-speed HyperTransport links between system devices, is brilliant for a server platform. However, the Opteron's performance in workstation-class applications seems a little shaky versus the Pentium 4 and Xeon. No doubt an Athlon 64 chip, in the form we expect it, would have trouble matching up against the Pentium 4 3GHz/875P chipset combo we tested recently. By this fall, Intel will be hawking processors based on the Prescott core, built on Intel's 90-nanometer fab process and rumored to have a longer pipeline and a larger cache.
What The Athlon 64 Needs To Succeed
