X-bit labs

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ CPU Review: AMD64 to the Masses! (page 14)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 12/28/2003 | 08:53 PM ]

Conclusion

Well, let’s cast a glance at the price-list. The official price of AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processors is $218. It means that this CPU is positioned as a competitor to Pentium 4 2.8GHz, which is selling for the same money, according to Intel’s official price-list. However, as we saw in the tests, Athlon 64 3000+ can outperform even faster Intel CPUs in most benchmarks. We can also state that Athlon 64 3000+ is faster than Athlon XP 3200+. This way, it definitely means that this processor is one of the best buys in its price category from price-to-performance point of view.

Of course, we could complain about low overclockability of the new Athlon 64 3000+ processor. However, these CPUs are pretty fast even at nominal frequencies. Besides, the possible 10% frequency growth could anyway ensure 7-8% extra performance.

Moreover, there are some questions about the upgradeability of the Socket754 processors, where Athlon 64 3000+ actually belongs. Athlon 64 3700+ will be the top model for this type of processor socket and it may cause some concerns about Athlon 64 3000+ being the best buy in its price range. However, if you take a look at any other processor sockets you will see that all of them have pretty limited prospects for future upgrades. Socket478 will be soon replaced with Socket T. Socket A CPUs will be simply discontinued after a while, and Socket940 will be replaced with Socket939 in the nearest future. This way the concern is absolutely unjustified.

As a result, there should be no doubts about AMD Athlon 64 3000+ being the best processor choice in the $200 price group today. And taking into account that this price category is the most popular among the DIY users (see our poll results here), we dare conclude that this product release will have a great influence on the wide-spreading and popularity of the AMD64 architecture in general. The major problem AMD might face now is the necessity to supply enough processors to satisfy the growing demand for these CPUs.

And in conclusion I would like to point out that the reduced L2 cache of the Athlon 64 processor doesn’t lead to any dramatic performance drops. The performance differences between Athlon 64 3000+ and Athlon 64 3200+ working at the same clock frequency but differing in L2 cache size do not exceed 5% in most cases. It means that the upcoming processors on the Newcastle core will be able to cope with their task OK. If they manage to retain this expected Athlon 64 performance level, the new AMD core will allow the company to reduce production costs and increase the revenues.