AMD Athlon 64 3800+ and FX-53: The First 939 CPUs
by Derek Wilson on June 1, 2004 12:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
So the verdict on 939 is that it isn't a revolutionary performer, and it won't bring peace to world. But socket 939 is really the finishing touch and final polish that the Athlon 64 line has been waiting for.
We have been waiting for this socket for a long time now, and if we lived in a perfect world, we would have seen a socket 939 like solution (with dual channel and all desktop Athlon 64 processors on one platform) from the beginning. Of course, now that its here, we have reason to rejoice. Socket 754 will become home to the new value line of processors as the current generation of Athlon XP processors fades into the sunset, and 940 pin platforms will still be used for Opteron servers and workstations.
We keep hearing rumors of an Opteron for 939, but we aren't exactly sure why something like that makes sense. Registered and ECC memory support are very important for server and workstation class systems. Stability is the most important factor in such platforms, and taking away such a big part of the equation really doesn't seem logical.
In the final analysis, current socket 754 and socket 940 users won't see gain any real value from "upgrading" to socket 939. The new addition of a dual channel memory controller for unbuffered DDR has no doubt given the Athlon 64 line a small performance increase, but it may not be as much as people had been expecting. The main advantages to socket 939 will be the convergence of the Athlon 64 desktop platform, the ability to use unbuffered RAM in conjunction with high end desktop processors, and the warm feeling that comes from knowing there's quite a lot of memory bandwidth under the hood with a dual channel memory controller on die.
The real reason we aren't seeing more intense performance increases from socket 939 is the same reason we don't huge performance differences between Athlon 64 processors with different sized caches (at least we don't see the variance we see among Pentium 4 based processors): the Athlon 64 is not an incredibly deeply pipelined architecture, and cache misses that result in pipeline stalls don't cause the processor to waste much of its time refilling the pipeline (as is the case with Intel's Netburst architecture in low cache situations). Really, the added bandwidth of dual channel is able to more than make up for the loss of 512kB in cache.
The socket 939 FX-53 absolutely takes the cake in terms of performance (though price will still be a barrier to entry, and an Athlon 64 processor will be a much better value). We are happy with the new line of Athlon 64 processors.
In the final analysis, we aren't talking about the be all end all of platforms and performance, but, certainly, anyone who wants an Athlon 64 system should look no further than socket 939 for its flexibility, overclockability, and performance.
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Icewind - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
Slight gramatical problem here......As we have mentioned in previous news articles, these new CPUs will run at the 3500+ will run at 2.2GHz while the 3800+ and FX-53 will run at 2.4 GHz each.
I think you wanted to say "These new CPU"S will be starting at the 3500+ model running at 2.2ghz to the 3800+ running at 2.4ghz."
Viditor - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
"I have updated the article to reflect the fact that we did indeed run our tests with 1T timings on the MSI K8T800 Pro 939 board"Thanks Derek...that's why I always read you guys!
WBurton - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
I'm getting a bit frustrated with the Sponsored Links constantly crashing my Opera 7.x. It'd be nice to review an article without having to reboot all the time.MIDIman - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
Is it possible that the release of a 64-bit OS will change all of these numbers and conlcusions?Lonyo - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
1066MHz HT bus?I thought the HT bus ram 200xmult
So isn't it 200x5, or 1000MHz?
(Typo on the first page?)
boban10 - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
what i dont like about many review sites that they encoding always the same codec and then say p4 is faster.well look here how they test it:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1603531...
i hope that your and anandtech next reviews will be more in depth about encoding, cause if people read your reviews about encoding they will buy p4.
but p4 is not faster in all encoding and that is important to say and test. and i like this site, but if next time i see again only one test in encoding (and that where is know that p4 win) then i will not read your page anymore. and no im not amd fan, im performance fan.
mechBgon - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
Jeff7181, you asked "Is running four unbuffered DIMMs really that necessary?"I was running three 512MB modules on my A7N8X Deluxe before replacing it with my K8V Deluxe. That was working out nicely for what I was using it for. When I installed my A64 and K8V Deluxe, I stepped *down* to 1.0GB because if I used all three modules, it would want to run them at DDR200/PC1600 speeds. If I could add a fourth module for 2.0GB total, that would be a welcome improvement. Yeah, I could invest in two 1GB DIMMs, I guess...
Intel's i865 and i875 families have brought 4 DDR400 DIMMs to Pentium4 owners, and that capability, along with CSA Gigabit, are two places where I have to admit Intel trumped AMD & Co. nicely, and has kept them trumped for quite a while too. So it would be nice to see AMD get their mojo working here.
DerekWilson - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
I have updated the article to reflect the fact that we did indeed run our tests with 1T timings on the MSI K8T800 Pro 939 board.I appologize for the omission.
Viditor - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
I wonder if Derek caught the bios setting tweak that Aces found."An incredible difference: with a faster bus turnaround, the memory subsystem is able to serve up to 24% more bandwidth, and the latency goes down from 51 (21.25 ns) to 47 cycles (19.6 ns). This results in measurable real world performance gains:
In 3DS Max 5.1, we gained 3% of performance
In Medieval War, Comanche we also gained 3%
In Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, we gained 5.5%
In WinRAR and Plasma, the performance advantage was no less than 9%"
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=65000305
nycxandy - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
Which motherboard was used for the 939 processors?