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- Date:
- Monday , May 31, 2004
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Editor:
- Cliff Murphy
- Google +1
AMD 939-pin CPUs
The AthlonFX loses 1 pin and the Athlon64 gains 185. We evaluate the new Athlon FX-53, 3800+, 3700+, and 3500+. We compare Intel's 3.4EE and legacy CPUs as well.
Introduction
AMD's new socket and CPU pin configuration makes its official debut today. It is the socket 939. The new socket will accomplish several things AMD needs to get done in order to define their markets correctly.
What is Changing?
First and foremost, the AthlonFX will be phased out of the socket 940 configuration, leaving the Opteron as the lone processor using the socket 940. The huge upside to the 939-pin move for the AthlonFX will be the fact that the FX configurations will no longer require registered sticks of Ram. The same vanilla flavored DDR that you have come to know and love is now at home with the AthlonFX.
Second, we have a split happening in the Athlon64 brand. Some Athlon64s will continue to be socket 754 parts while others will share the socket 939 with the FX series. This is being done to allow AMD to segment their 754-pin CPUs as their "budget" CPUs as the Athlon XP is slowly phased out of the retail markets. Once this is done, it will of course give AMD claim to 64-bit OS ready CPUs from top to bottom. The Athlon64 CPUs that inhabit the socket 939 will pick up the benefits of dual channel memory while the 754-pin CPUs stay with single channel.
So what exactly is the difference between an AthlonFX and an Athlon64 when they both use the 939-pin socket? The answer to that question is probably best answered, "Not a whole damn lot." Both are identical except for their L2 cache. The AthlonFX has 1MB l2 and the Athlon64 has 512KB L2...unless it is a 754-pin Athlon64 and then it might have 1MB as well, but it will not have dual channel memory. A bit confused? There is a nice chart here in a bit but first more on the FX.
Below you can see our 940-pin AthlonFX beside our 939-pin AthlonFX. If you look at the bottom left hand corner of each CPU, you will see where the pin in question is.
The next picture shows you the pin configurations of the 939 and 754 CPUs.
940 FX Vs 939 FX
We thought it might be beneficial to get this out of the way early in a direct head to head showdown. We took a 940-pin AthlonFX-53 that we showed you here in March, and directly compare it to a 939-pin AthlonFX-53 here running on an Asus A8V Deluxe with 1GB of DDR-400.
As mentioned above, the new 939-pin AthlonFX does not require registered DIMMs, but rather any of our DDR-400 will work. For this exercise we used a tweaked out set of Corsair DDR-400 running at low latencies.
The new board we are using from Asus is very fast. Out of the several boards we have in their pre-production sample form, the Asus A8V Deluxe was the fastest and most stable. Its heart is a VIA K8T800Pro chipset. We will cover nForce3 and K8T800Pro performance in another article.
As you can see from the synthetic memory scores above, the non-regged DIMMs are a bit faster. There are two reasons for this. First the DIMMs are not registered and therefore there are less latencies involved in passing data to the chips. Second, we were able to tweak the timings on the non-regged sticks just a bit more.
Following below are a wide sample of benchmarks pitting the 939-pin and 940-pin AthlonFX-53 CPUs head to head.
As you can see from these benchmarks, for the most part, the 939-pin FX-53 does a good job of leading the pack with and exception of one anomaly.
Bottom Line on the AthlonFX
There is no doubt that the move to the 939-pin package and non-registered DIMMs is a good thing for the AthlonFX brand.
Now that we have all of this out of the way, let's move to the rest of our contenders and see how they stack up against Intel and past CPUs.