AMD's Athlon FX beats Intel's Pentium 4 3.2 GHz in almost every way

Dom · Sep 2, 2003, 10:28 PM

WE WERE very close to Athlon 64 and Athlon FX last week but didn't get time to play with the systems. Still the world is too small a place to hide the numbers until the 23rd of this month.

AMD has sent many Athlon FXs and 64s to people around UK and continental Europe and if you are an OEM or a system integrator, you know how these babies look and perform.

The Athlon FX on Windows XP 32 bit beats Intel's latest release 3.2 GHz but that's still the Northwood core, of course.

In the Sandra memory test, Athlon FX delivers 5600 MB/s while an Intel Pentium 4 3.2 on Canterwood 875 with DDR 400 of course only delivers 5000MB/s.

In Quake 3 , which was always considered Intel's playground and patch, the Athlon FX is slightly under nine per cent faster on AMD's processor rather than Intel's "brain of a PC".

In Unreal 1024x768, it's close to 18 per cent advantage in AMD's favour.

3Dmark03 at 1024x768 shows that the FX is two per cent slower than on Intel. Pcmark03 is faster on Intel by five per cent since this is an Intel heavily optimized application while the memory score is 18 per cent faster on Athlon FX due to its integrated memory controller.

Still, it's not all roses, roses as Intel still holds the crown in all SSE 2 optimized application and the ones that use HyperThreading. I am mainly talking about rendering applications, where Intel still holds the crown but the gap that used to be huge between Intel's 3.2 and Athlon XP 3200+ is now significantly smaller.

In 3Dstudio Max, a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz with HT is about 10 per cent faster if you render just one frame but in a complete scene that you want to render took exactly the same in both systems. It took them both an hour with a small time difference that's not even worthy of mention and is like a twinkle in the eye (nimesha).

That's what you will see in reviews when they go live on 23rd in exactly three week's time.

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Source: TheInquirer

~~craig588~~ · Sep 2, 2003, 10:34 PM

ATHLON FX?!?!?!

FX!?!?

I just despise these names.

~~DriveEuro~~ · Sep 3, 2003, 12:48 AM

Holy crap that is fast as hell.

nForcer · Sep 3, 2003, 02:24 AM

Fast compared to what Intel has currently. Intel has been out benching AMD for how many years? Yeah thought so. Looks like they are finally giving them a run for their money - the first time in a LONG time. Competition is a good thing

~~DriveEuro~~ · Sep 3, 2003, 11:19 AM

Competition keeps products cheaper. That's what I'm about.

***Zardon*** · Sep 3, 2003, 11:23 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by DriveEuro
Competition keeps products cheaper. That's what I'm about.

I dont know I wouldnt say you are cheap bud !!!

***Veridian3*** · Sep 3, 2003, 11:33 AM

The problem AMD will have is how fast can they scale the FX?

The XP was (is) a really good processor however i always felt AMD couldnt scale it as fast as they needed where as Intel gave me a feeling that they can scale the p4 as fast as they want.

I wouldnt be surprised if the FX comes out and leaves a p4 3.2 lagging behind and a very short while later Intel are anouncing and shipping processors in excess of 3.6ghz that take back the benchmark crown.

Stu

PoopyTheJ · Sep 3, 2003, 12:40 PM

That has been a problem for AMD, scaling the XP can only go so far. As we've seen with faster XP chips clocked LOWER but with a larger cache ie Barton core. Hopefully the FX has fixed this problem but I find it hard to believe as the Athlon has always had a multitude of pipelines but had them to short to scale anywhere near what the p4 can scale to. We'll have to see I guess.

FluffyChicken · Sep 3, 2003, 02:25 PM

I think it'll depend on how well 64bit Windows takes off (forget Linux/Unix as that isn't a mass consumer market)
If it takes off well then the 32bit (AthlonFX ? I'm confused already

) may not need to go so far. It should scale well (being at the beginning of it's life) but how quick and in which direction is to be seen.
Don't forget AMD scaled the original Athlon quicker than Intel could scale it's PIII's

mike2h · Sep 3, 2003, 02:52 PM

to bad tualatin could not scale. except for bandwidth those things rocked! my wifes 1.2 tulatin celeron, running at 1450 scores the same as 1.6 p4 in sandra! like i said before it gets its but kicked in mem tests, but that is still cool. especially considering it is a celeron(actually a 100mhz p3 with tualatin optim.). would have liked to seen what a 'real' tualatin could do with its 133 bus & 512 L2 cache. heard they overclocked well.