[PLUG] Athlon64 vs Opteron64
E. Rogan Creswick
creswick at cs.orst.edu
Fri Mar 26 16:33:02 UTC 2004
AthlonRob writes:
> would be very surprised if they added the additional HT links
> necessary for running the chips in an SMP environment... they want
> SMP users to pay the premium for the Opteron chips. The difference
I was under the impression that the Opterons have the northbridge on
die, and that contributed greatly to the increased cost as you
progress up in the n-way chips (there are Opteron 14x, 24x, and 84x
chips for different cardinalities of SMP). I also seem to recall that
the opterons have three times the I/O, ammounting in something like
12gbps bi-directional. I found a good (seemingly unbiased) review at
anandtech comparing the opteron 244's with a dual 3ghz zeon, but I
can't locate it at the moment.
-Rogan
> at that point between the Athlon64 and the AthlonFX, if the
> AthlonFX survives that long, will likely simply be additional L2
> cache, I suppose.
>
> > Some of the newer Athlon64 chips have 512MB of cache instead of 1MB.
>
> s/512MB/512KB/ :-)
>
> I think, again I'm not sure (AMD sure is full of no information as of
> late) all the newer Athlon64's are moving to the half-meg of cache.
>
> > These are currently relatively cheap for the performance you get.
> > Even with the missing memory bus, the memory bandwidth is reasonable
> > and the memory latency is quite nice. The ability to use cheap,
> > off-the-shelf DDR400 RAM is nice. If you need raw bandwidth, the FX
> > is more expensive, but faster than an Opteron.
>
> I'd love an AthlonFX. :-)
>
> > This is about as concise as I can make it. AMD isn't making things
> > very clear at all. Perhaps their intention is to confuse us all to
> > the point where we just buy something :-)
>
> Well, that strategy has worked for years at Intel.... :-)
>
> Rob
>
>
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