Athlon FX-60 : 200 MHz more
Unlike the Extreme Edition 955, the Athlon 64 FX-60 is distinguished from its predecessor by only one difference, frequency. The increase is from 2.4 to 2.6 GHz. No, this is not a typing error, and yes, the FX-57 is clocked at 2.8 GHz. Even if it has integrated the FX line, the Athlon 64 FX-60 is overall an Athlon 64 X2 from a purely technical point of view (see our article dedicated to Athlon 64 X2 processors). Similar to the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, it also has two cores each with1 MB of cache, while its frequency is increased 200 MHz.
In short, we can say that the FX-60 possesses two FX-55 cores. By the way, this processor was removed from AMD´s price list, because of the FX-60, which was introduced at the FX-57´s previous cost (US$ 1031). So far, the FX-57´s price is reduced to that of the FX-55 (US$ 827). It is interesting to note the high cost for users to change from single to dual core. For a 4800+, which includes some sort of 4000+ dual core, you have to pay the equivalent of 2.35 times the price of a 4000+.
SmithField vs Presler in practice
What about the advantages of the new Presler core compared to the SmithField? To find out the improvements in practice we started with power consumption. Measurements of each CPU with identical configurations (except for the Athlon motherboard) were made in stand-by under Windows desktop and then in load under Prime 95 (as many sessions as physical or logical cores):
- Athlon 64 FX-60: 111 watts in stand-by, 187 watts in load
- Pentium EE 840: 166 watts in stand-by, 292 watts in load
- Pentium EE 955: 168 watts in stand-by, 267 watts in load
There is a power consumption reduction due to the change to 65 nm. It doesn´t seem to have an impact in stand-by, however, and the explanation is simple. The Pentium « Presler » does support C1E and EIST energy saving functions, which reduce clock frequencies and voltage if 100% CPU use isn´t required. These two functions, which are supported by the SmithField such as the Pentium EE 840, will be back in the new Presler revision, expected out in the second quarter. Either way, we are still far from the low power consumption of the Athlon 64 FX-60...
A second point that drew our attention was cache performance measured with ScienceMark for latency and RMAA for bandwidth:
The doubling of L2 cache didn´t lead to latency increases as seen in the change from the Northwood to Prescott. However, like with the change from Prescott 1 MB cache to Prescott 2 MB cache, the increase to 2MB leads to a slowing down in L2 cache after the first 256 KB. This reduction is less significant, however, and is 5% compared to 13% for mono-cores.
Here are gains in applications at 3.2 GHz:
WinRAR, which is very cache hungry, logically benefits the most from a new core with a very appreciable performance gain. Others are games, which run at approximately 2%, followed by video encoding at less than 1%. Scientific calculation or 3d rendering gains are less than half a point.
The Presler isn´t revolutionary but adds several small improvements. The most significant is the price. Except for the Extreme Edition, the Pentium D 9xx have equivalent frequencies for the same cost or are even less expensive than the Pentium D 8xx.
The tests
We used the following configurations:
Intel Socket 775 :
- ASUSTeK P5WD2-E motherboard(i975X)
- ATI Radeon X850 XT PE
- 2 x 512 MB DDR2-667 4-4-4
- 2 x Raptor 74 GB
- Windows XP SP2 French
AMD Socket 939 :
- ASUS A8N SLI Premium motherboard
- ATI Radeon X850 XT PE
- 2 x 512 MB DDR-400 2-2-2
- 2 x Raptor 74 GB
- Windows XP SP2 French
All performance figures reported for AMD Athlon 64 processors involve the latest "E" version. As this article uses a new Intel test processor motherboard we took the opportunity to update our test protocol:
- Mathematica changes from version 5.1 to 5.2
- WinRAR from version 3.5 to 3.51
- TMPGEnc from version 3.1.5 to 3.3.7, use of the DV Mainconcept codec to decode our DV file (faster)
- VirtualDub from version 1.6.5 to 1.6.11 and from the standard mode to best quality
- DivX from version 5.2.1 to 6.1 and from standard mode to best quality
- Far Cry from version 1.3 to 1.33
- Pacific Fighter from version 3.04m to 4.02
The two processors were easily and successfully overclocked via the multiplying coefficient. It wasn´t locked for increases and decreases in AMD´s FX and Intel´s Pentium Extreme Edition lines. The FX-60 clock frequency increased from 2.6 to 2.96 GHz (+13.5%) whereas the Pentium EE 955 reached 4.26 GHz as compared to 3.46 GHz (+23%).
