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Old October 3rd 03, 02:38 AM
Pccomputerdr
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After reading hundreds of benchmarks, I think it's fairly safe to say
that Athlon64FX and Athlon64 are "overall" the worlds fastest "32-bit"
x86 cpus,


Either you're very naïve or very optimist. Athlon64FX and Athlon64 have their
ups and downs and there are benchmarks that show that in some areas in spite of
their 64-bit design, they don't perform as good as Pentium4.

Operating with 32-bit OS and 32-bit app benchmarks. It's not faster
because it's 64-bit, it's faster because it's AMD's new cpu-core, the K8.


With the Hyper-Threading Intel Technology, AMD is no longer the king of the
jungle. Having said that, Intel CPUs are more stable and reliable than any AMD
CPUs. Even though AMD doesn't seem to have software incompatibility issues, all
applications on the market are written for Intel CPUs. Meaning, the Intel CPUs
are the norm for applications whereas AMD users hope not to hit the one in a
million software incompatibility jackpot. Not to mention that AMD CPU tends to
have overheating problem. The motherboards for Intel CPUs performs better and
more stable. Intel manufactures CPUs, and knows inside out everything down to
undocumented secrets about its products, and they produce their own motherboard
chipsets for their own CPUs whereas AMD uses some chipset from a third party.

(P4 is still competitive on it's strong sides, like mediaencoding)


It pulls ahead as some benchmark tests show.

Remember, you're not exactly paying more for these than 'other' fast
32-bit cpus.


Make no mistake that Athlon64 is not cheap either. As AMD holds more market, it
slips out of being the poor man's CPU. ;-)

More nonsens, excuse me. Only Intels megadisaster, the 'Itanic, must
run 32-bit apps with emulation. Since this 300 million transistor
fiasco isn't particular fast even in native 64-bit mode, it's totally
irrelevant anyway. With much, much cheaper, and at least equally fast
Opterons, AthlonFX and G5 on the market, you frankly have to be a
complete idiot to buy Intel 64-bit.


Well, people at Intel already know that they have to provide 32-bit
compatibility in their 64-bit CPU if they want to stay in business. Intel's
previous attempts and approaches for 64-bit CPU design were nothing more than
brainstorming to find their direction in the right course. Intel has some
ongoing projects for the new Intel 64-bit CPU.

The problem with Intel is that it always stuck to its old CPU design and
architecture with only minor improvements by adding a few new features. Intel
kept bumping up the CPU speed without any difference in CPU design. Every time
a new and faster Intel CPU was released, it was like re-inventing the wheel
once again, but on the other hand, people at AMD did something so radical by
totally building a new CPU from scratch with its uniquely architectural design.
Such uniquely architectural design allowed people at AMD to expand such CPU
technology to 64-bit. Their expansion from 32-bit to 64-bit CPU is the same
concept of expansion from 16-bit to 32-bit CPU.

In 16-bit CPU, there were all these 16-bit registers AX, BX, CX, DX, SP, BP,
SI, DI, CS, DS, SS, ES, IP.

The expansion to 32-bit was not revolutionary as the same thing applies to
64-bit expansion. In order to maintain 32-bit application compatibility in
64-bit CPU, AMD people followed the same path that has been followed 16-bit
application compatibility in 32-bit CPU.

ax=16-bit register, eax=32-bit register, rax=64-bit register

AMDs K8 cpus run both 32-bit and 64-bit native.


Indeed, I think I mixed it up with the Intel's prototype 64-bit CPU. When I
looked at the Athlon64's register set, I noticed it could run both 32-bit and
64-bit native.

Depending on what kind of direction Intel takes in its 64-bit CPU design, there
might be fork on the road, and serious issues of incompatibility among 64-bit
AMD and Intel CPUs. If Intel doesn't adopt such 64-bit register expansion that
is similar to 64-bit AMD CPUs with such compatibility, every 64bit application
has to be written specifically for both of these CPUs, and no software company
will write two different versions of the same application. They will stick to
the CPU that is compatible with 32-bit applications because that's what all
consumers want.

Software companies might adopt 64-bit Athlon as a norm for their future
applications if Intel fails to provide 32-bit application compatibility in
their 64-bit CPU. Under such threat and pressure, Intel might have to go along
with the similar adoption of the AMD technology in their 64-bit CPU.

I think AMD, without a doubt, has already provided the best means of 32-bit
application compatibility in their new 64-bit CPUs in a very convenient and
practical way.

It is such a big loss that AMD for some reason is not interested in
manufacturing motherboard chipsets for their own CPUs.

Linux is ported.


Linux is a good and very stable, but not a mainstream operating system.
Compared to Microsoft operating system users, there are not many Linux users at
all. Many consumers could not care less if Linux is ported or not. Linux is not
where the market is. Software companies are not going crazy about writing
applications for Linux.

As for MS, WinXP has basicly been ported to 64-bit
for quite while now. Work right now, involves doing a version for the
Athlon64/Opteron. A beta version exists. I wouldn't trust you as a
judge as to how reliable it is. Not considering your other claims.


The beta version exists but many instability issues. The operating system keeps
hanging up. The drivers have to be written from scratch.

More nonsens. On the contrary, the Athlon64s have already proven
themselves to be superlatively fast on 32-bit games _in_particular_!
Rule seem to be, newer game, bigger advantage.


Athlon64 pulls a little ahead of Pentium 4 in "Direct3D Gaming" mostly due to
the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card. Even with the use of the best video card,
Athlon64 pulls a little bit ahead which is not anything so significant.

If you're interested in tons and tons of _32-bit_benchmarks_ for the
Athlon64, Athlon64FX and Opteron, please visit:

http://www.extremetech.com
http://www.anandtech.com
http://www.tomshardware.com
http://hardocp.com
http://www.aceshardware.com
http://www.tech-report.com


Let's look at the benchmark test at www.extremetech.com

1- In "Content Creation Winstone 2003" benchmark test, Pentium4 pulls ahead of
all Athlon64 CPUs.
2- In "Quicktime 6.1 Encoding (MPEG-4)" benchmark test, Pentium4 pulls ahead of
all Athlon64 CPUs.
3- In "XMPEG5 / DiVX 5.1 Video Encode" benchmark test, Pentium4 pulls ahead of
all Athlon64 CPUs.
4- In "Windows Media Encoder 9" benchmark test, Pentium4 pulls ahead of all
Athlon64 CPUs.
5- In "AfterEffects 5.5 Rendering" benchmark test, Pentium4 pulls ahead of all
Athlon64 CPUs.
6- In "Music Encoding" benchmark test, Pentium4 pulls ahead of all Athlon64
CPUs.
7- In "3D Studio Max 5.0" benchmark test, Pentium4 pulls ahead of all Athlon64
CPUs.
8- In "Cinebench 2003 CPU Rendering" benchmark test, Pentium4 pulls ahead of
all Athlon64 CPUs.
9- In "LightWave 7.5 Render" benchmark test, Pentium4 pulls ahead of all
Athlon64 CPUs.
10- In "PCMark 2002 CPU" benchmark test, Pentium4 pulls ahead of all Athlon64
CPUs.
11- In "PCMark 2002 Memory" benchmark test, Pentium4 pulls ahead of all
Athlon64 CPUs.

One shouldn't expect too much performance gain from going to 64-bit
from 32-bit. There will be some gain, but not much, not at all like
the 500% (?) that was accomplished going from 16-bit to 32-bit.
Then we went from a paged memory model to a linear. This time we stay
linear. The point of 64-bit is the larger memoryspace. To do things
that is not possible with 32-bit.


Well, yes and no! No immediate performance gain! You will notice significant
performance gain once software companies start utilizing the features of the
64-bit CPU.