Dean, you mentioned upgrading your system to an FX Athlon 64; does this mean
you already are running a socket 939 system? In any case, the FX versions
of the Athlon 64s continue to carry a considerable price premium for a 200
to 400MHz advantage over the regular Athlon 64s. Unless you think that your
system will be CPU bound for the tasks that you typically do, I would
suggest looking at the Athlon 64 4000, which is a 2.2GHz processor with 1MB
of L2 cache. While not cheap at $334, this is quite a bit less expensive
than the FX 55 and FX 57 processors (the FX57, which has a 400MHz faster
processor (17%), costs three times as much ($1011)).
As others have suggested, for the kind of extra money that the FX series
costs, your could get a dual core processor, such as the Athlon 64 2X 4800,
which has two 2.4GHz cores and two 1MB caches. Still, this is considerably
more than the Athlon 64 4000, whose single core is running at this same
speed and has the same amount of cache. Although AMD gives the dual core
version a higher "speed" rating of 4800, the circumstances under which you
will see the advantage of dual cores is still very limited. Although not as
scarce as finding software that is optimized for a 64 bit environment (as
others have already discussed), software that is properly multithreaded is
not easy to find, either, especially for the home user. The advantage of
having dual cores will really only make itself felt when you are running two
CPU intensive processes at the same time. For example, encoding video and
playing a computer game at the same time.
On the other hand, multicore processors and multithreaded software is
definitely the way of the future. Just, don't expect the change over to
this new world to happen that quickly. I think that programmers are finding
the change from coding for a single processor to coding for multiple
processors is not going to be all that easy. There will be a lot that will
have to be learned along the way about what the pitfalls are and how to
avoid them. Although most software out there, now, will not have any
trouble running on a dual core processor (it just won't able to take any
special advantage of it), there are some minor problems emerging for older
software now being placed in a multi-processor environment. I've noticed
this is the computer game arena, in particular. For example, some games
(such as Battlefield 2, a new game, and Battlezone 2, an old game) seem to
have problems with their multiplayer connection when run in a dual core
environment. This may be related to an issue with the clocks on the two
cores not running exactly in synch. This is easy enough to deal with, by
telling the operating system to just run the program on one core, but it
does suggest that there will be some bumps along the way before dual core
processors and multithreaded software become the new standard.
Just a side note on the Sempron 64 3400 that Mark mentioned, although I'm
sure Mark is aware of this, AMD's naming system can create some confusion
with their Sempron line. For example, the Athlon 64 3400 and the Sempron 64
3400, although they seem to bear the same "rating" are by no means equal.
(One is a 2GHz processor with 256MB of cache, and the other is either a
2.2GHz processor with 1MB of cache or a 2.4GHz processor with 512MB of
cache.) Although the ratings for the regular Athlon 64s match up well
enough with the Pentium 4 clock speeds, the Sempron ratings match up better
with the Celeron D's or the older Athlon XP's clock speeds. So, while
someone who is interested in a CPU with high performance (a computer gamer,
for example) probably should stick to the regular Athlon 64s, the Sempron 64
models have the advantage of a low price and a smaller manufacturing process
(90nm) (compared to the other socket 754 processors), which can be a boon in
some applications, such as Mark's idea of using it in a media box, where
quiet cooling is likely to be a major factor.
John Sproule
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dean Kukral" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, January 08, 2006 12:36 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] 64 Bit Computing
>I am considering upgrading my system to an AMD FX-57 or FX-60.
>
> These are 64 bit processors that require the 64 bit edition of Windows.
>
> I read in a "user review" of the 57 at Newegg that neither NAV nor McAffee
> support this version of
> Windows.
>
> Is this true, and if they do not, are there good 64 bit anti-virus
> programs available that anyone here
> has some experience with?
>
> Also, do most higher level programs run seamlessly on the 64 bit
> processors? I assume that the
> anti-virus programs work at a somewhat more basic level than most games,
> for example.
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