AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and FX-62

AMD takes on DDR2 with AM2

Originally planned for launch during the upcoming Computex 2006 on the 6th of June, Intel's earlier than expected announcements of their next generation Core 2 Duo processors slated for the same period have certainly 'helped' AMD shuffle many launch dates pertaining to their processors and processor technologies in this busy month. Today, AMD's Socket AM2 processor platform for the desktop goes official and it is certainly no paper launch as you can tell by the many AM2 motherboard previews we've been churning out in recent times.

Just for the record, we'll make a quick recap on what the Socket AM2 infrastructure is about. Where once upon a time the memory controller(s) was only found in a motherboard's Northbridge chipset, AMD's Athlon 64 and Sempron series based on their K8 processor architecture made a bold move to integrate that within the processor die itself. This fusion has more or less eliminated the need to have a traditional Northbridge chip unless it had other functions like supplying more PCI Express lanes for advanced motherboard models such as those supporting SLI and CrossFire. Simplifying motherboard design was only a byproduct of this move, but the core reason was to provide the processor direct access to the memory, thereby greatly reducing latencies and increasing performance substantially. Part of their Direct Connect architecture, this move had greatly benefited AMD and has been a hallmark trait of their entire processor series from the mobile segment to the server space.

However, integrating the memory controller did pose them an issue of evolution when memory speeds and technologies change, thereby requiring their engineers to tweak and update the processors whenever the need arises. We've all seen this evolution take place via the initial launch of the Athlon 64 platform when Socket-754 debuted and then later Socket-939 to support dual-channel memory. If you recall, AMD actually took a while to workaround their Socket-940 infrastructure of the Opteron series to realize the Socket-939 for the performance desktop market. This is the most inevitable issue of the K8 architecture integrating the memory controller with the CPU - added complexity. Additionally, the original K8 memory controller was designed to support DDR memory. While AMD would argue that they don't require DDR2 memory to deliver added performance, the reality was that the memory manufacturers and Intel's entire lineup had long moved to focus on DDR2 memory technology that can offer a greater memory bandwidth (at some latency penalty of course). Memory prices between DDR and DDR2 have become non-existent and have actually worked against DDR in recent times. Additionally, DDR2 memory quickly evolved to embrace the 1GHz mark and from what we've seen in earlier trade shows, more can be expected. Foreseeing these issues, AMD had of course made known to the industry that they too would be shifting to adopt DDR2 memory technology and today, on the 23rd of May, that has come to pass.

With a new Socket AM2 infrastructure to support DDR2 memory technology, AMD is offering the entire gamut of processors from entry-level to the high-end on this new socket and thus unifying what was once split among different motherboard and socket variety. This is definitely a welcomed move for all levels of the industry. The AM2 processors have been validated officially to support DDR2-800 on AMD's latest Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 X2 series. Now that eclipses Intel's current DDR2-667 official support and matches that of the upcoming Core 2 Duo processors later this year. Standard Athlon 64 and Semprons however, would support up to DDR2-667 and is still plenty speedy enough. The good news though, all AM2 processors will have a dual-channel memory controller and this will ensure great performance and responsiveness from all processor ranks (and would probably make it that much more difficult for Intel to compete on the lower end scale). For those of you who feared that AM2 would be priced a lot more than currently available processors, AMD has put that rumor to rest with this official Processor-In-Box pricing:-

The prices reflected here are actually no more than the existing processor lineup, so that is good news as well. With the launch of AM2, we've been lucky to get our hands on AMD's latest top models for thorough testing, namely the Athlon 64 FX-62 and the Athlon 64 X2 5000+. That's also a reason why we've reflected dual-core processor pricings only in the table to keep it inline with the scope of this article. In terms of detailed processor specifications, not a whole lot has changed since the Toledo days, but with AM2 processors, Virtualization technology on hardware has been included in the spec. Here's how the top AM2 processors from AMD stack up with their previous best and Intel's:-

Test Setup & Benchmarks

Lets get right down to what matters most, and that's none other than performance. As presented on the earlier page, we'll be matching the Athlon 64 FX-62 and the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ against the Athlon 64 FX-60 and Athlon 64 X2-4800+. Take note that the new FX-62 had been given a 200MHz speed bump while the 5000+ model has been given a 200MHz speed bump and had its L2 cache slashed to 512KB per core. So these processors are not just DDR2 technology bolted on to existing processor specs. On the Intel front, we bring up the recently covered Pentium 965 XE and the Pentium D 960 and see how they fit in. This time round, we updated the testbeds quite a bit and here are their revised specifications:-

• The components used in the AMD Socket AM2 testbed include:-
• ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce 590 SLI chipset)
• AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 and Athlon 64 X2 5000+ processor
• 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR2-800 non-ECC memory modules (CAS 4, 4-4-12)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
• MSI GeForce 7900 GT 256MB - with NVIDIA Detonator XP 84.21
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

• The components used in the AMD Socket-939 testbed include:-
• ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce4 SLI X16 chipset)
• AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 and Athlon 64 X2 4800+ processor
• 2 x 512MB Kingston DDR-400 non-ECC memory modules (CAS 2, 2-2-5)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
• MSI GeForce 7900 GT 256MB - with NVIDIA Detonator XP 84.21
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

• The components used in the Intel testbed include:-
• ASUS P5WD2-E Premium (Intel 975X Express chipset)
• Intel Pentium 965 Extreme Edition (with Hyper-Threading), Intel Pentium D 960
• 2 x 512MB Kingston DDR2-667 non-ECC memory modules (CAS 4. 4-4-10)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
• MSI GeForce 7900 GT 256MB - with NVIDIA Detonator XP 84.21
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

• The benchmarks used in this review include:-
• BAPCo SYSmark 2004
• SPECCPU 2000 v1.2
• Lightwave 3D 7.5
• Futuremark PCMark 2005 Pro
• Cinebench 2003
• XMpeg 4.5 (DivX encoding)
• Futuremark 3DMark05 Pro
• Futuremark 3DMark06 Pro
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• AquaMark3
• Quake 4 ver.1.20
• F.E.A.R.

Results - SYSmark 2004

The new Athlon 64 FX-62 pummeled everything in its path with a near 7% speed leap over the nearest competitor (even if it is AMD's own). Now that's a commendable performance leap and not the paltry sub 3% gains we once used to see in the days of testing single-core processors. Evident from the graph, it's clear that the K8 architecture scales really well with clock speed increments, more so than Intel's current processor architecture. Even the Office Productivity suite was won over by the FX-62 despite half the cache size of Intel's dual-core lineup. The Athlon 64 X2 5000+ performed reasonably for its specifications, but when you start to consider its price, that's when it becomes more attractive since it matches the existing US$1,000 FX-60 model with regards to performance. Lets move on and see if the processor standings stay true on all accounts.

Results - SPECCPU 2000 v1.2

Intel still kept the leadership in SPECCPU testing, but the new Athlon 64 FX-62 wasn't all that far back. The floating-point tests were however still strongly in favor of Intel. We saw this coming, so it wasn't at all unexpected. The Athlon 64 X2 5000+ however, couldn't even keep up with the X2 4800+ model mainly due to its relatively small total cache size, but its high clock speeds made certain it wasn't trailing too far back. So watch out for other benchmarks that may favor processors with more cache.

Results - Lightwave 3D 7.5

No surprises here as AMD continues to leapfrog Intel in this rendering benchmark.

Results - Futuremark PCMark05

Next, we have some lighter tests from the PCMark05 test and it seems to favor Intel's CPUs for its synthetic tests. The results from the memory test suite portion however, have improved a good fold thanks to AMD's adoption of high-speed DDR2 memory for their high-end processors.

Results - Cinebench 2003 & XMpeg 4.5

Cinebench 2003 is also another rendering benchmark and as you expected, it was AMD land mostly. The Pentium 965 XE put a good showing here only because of Hyper-Threading. However, the Athlon 64 FX-62 made short work of this test and surpassed the Intel by nearly 5%. Not bad at all for the same price. The X2 5000+ model too is hanging in well and as again, scores just as well as the FX-60 predecessor, but for a lighter price tag.

Video encoding has always been an Intel favorite benchmark, but after our testbed revamp with the latest components and drivers, it looks like AMD is faring a whole lot better; most especially with the Athlon 64 FX-62. The Pentium 965 XE could have scored better if not for its Hyper-Threading getting in the way. Though we've explained why this is so before, it is still weird to find a technology that would give a component better performance in some situations and worse in others. In any case, Hyper-Threading is on its last legs since Intel will not have that incorporated in the future Core 2 Duo processors.

Results - Futuremark 3DMark05 and 3DMark06

Moving to gaming related results, our expectations were on the mark with AMD riding the pole position, though not by a lot in these synthetic tests. Let's find out if these results stay true for other games that we've line up next.

Results - Unreal Tournament 2004 and AquaMark 3

While gaming results from both Unreal Tournament 2004 and AquaMark 3 have always come out in favor of AMD processors, the results were even more pronounced after our testbed upgrades. With more than 25% performance advantage by choosing AMD processors, the results are simply outlandish, but real and have been verified multiple times. Just a side note: we chose to show the resolution of 1600x1200 for Unreal because the results were actually still CPU bound at this level for our testbed configuration.

Results - Quake 4 and F.E.A.R.

We chose Quake 4 for extending gaming tests and the results again were synonymous. However, Intel didn't fare too bad here, though they were still trailing. Enabling SMP did wonders with the quad logical cores of the Pentium 965 XE, but not so with the Pentium D.

F.E.A.R. with most settings set to maximum for good gaming quality actually had the GeForce 7900 GT rather bogged down, so all of the compared processors ranked similarly.

Conclusion

Speculations were running amok several months prior to AMD's AM2 launch as enthusiasts were concerned if DD2 memory technology's higher latencies would diminish any returns for adopting higher speed memory or even perform worse off. Thankfully, DDR2 memory technology has progressed reasonably and there are high-speed low latency memory modules. Along with AMD's careful tweaking, the net outcome as our results have shown, the new AM2 processors have nothing to lose and all to gain.

With respect to our thorough testing of the new Athlon 64 FX-62 and Athlon 64 X2 5000+ AM2 processors, we're totally convinced of their all-round performance delivery in almost all aspects with top-notch gaming performance to boot. The Athlon 64 FX-62 is now the fastest consumer processor at about the same US$1,000 that the FX-60 was retailing and is anywhere between 5% and 7% speedier. The Athlon 64 X2 5000+ on the other hand turned out to be somewhat of a 'value' buy of the high-end as it can rival the FX-60 in performance and yet cost about a third less.

The question that most enthusiasts have ringing in their head now is if Intel's Core 2 Duo later this year can actually deliver the statistically amazing performance revealed in this year's Intel Developers Forum. While seemingly good, we've no way to verify those claims until the processor arrives at our labs. In any case, we've seen some of the leaked AMD roadmaps and they look equally promising with much faster AM2 processors than we've seen today. Given the kind of performance scaling we've seen from our testing, they might just be a formidable match for Intel's next gen. However, we'll cap these assumptions as of now as these are future products where specs and launch dates have a tendency to change as time goes along. When the time is right, we'll definitely reveal all the juicy details.

For now, the AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 reigns in our lab and the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ comes across as a very compelling model that manages FX-60-like performance for a lot less. The only downside is the large cooler needed to tame the high-end processors comfortably and quietly. However, AMD has that all covered with the Energy Efficient AM2 processor models that have a TDP rating of 65W. Of course these go for a slight premium, but they can certainly be considered for powerful media center PC usage. AM2 adopters can expect a whole slew of motherboard varieties from ATI, NVIDIA, VIA and SiS to fulfill their features-to-performance needs. On the high-end, look out for NVIDIA's nForce 590 SLI that we've also just covered. On the mainstream side of things, expect NVIDIA's nForce 550, 570 Ultra, GeForce 6100 series, VIA's K8T890 and ATI's RS485, RS550 and RD580 class chipsets. So stay tuned as we bring you more platform coverage to complement AM2's launch.

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