X-bit labs

AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU Review (page 2)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/09/2006 | 09:01 PM ]

Athlon 64 FX-60: Closer Look

Although Athlon 64 FX-60 is the first dual-core CPU in the Athlon 64 FX processor family, there are not so many innovations that this processor has acquired. Just as the top dual-core processor from the Athlon 64 X2 family, the 4800+ model, the newcomer is based on Toledo core. In other words, Athlon 64 FX-60 features two cores, each with 1MB L2 cache. It is manufactured with 90nm production technology. The only difference between the Athlon 64 FX-60 and the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ is the higher clock frequency of the former, that has now been increased by 200MHz and equals 2.6GHz.

The formal specs of the new AMD processor are given in the table below:

As we see, the increase in the Toledo core clock speed hasn’t affected the typical heat dissipation value claimed by the manufacturer. In other words, Athlon 64 FX-60 is fully compatible with all the mainboards and cooling systems, which work fine with Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPUs. It seems to have been far not an easy job for AMD to make all the thermal and electrical characteristics of the new solutions fit into the previous boundaries. The lower nominal Vcore of the new Athlon 64 FX-60 is an evident indicator of this fact. While the top Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 X2 processors work at the nominal voltages lying between 1.35V-1.4V, the Vcore of the new Athlon 64 FX-60 has been dropped down by 0.05V.

This seems to be one of the major tricks AMD used to ensure the compatibility of the newcomer with the existing platforms. As a result, the manufacturer has to pay more attention to speed binning of the semiconductor dies that will become the basis for the new Athlon 64 FX-60. However, this will hardly affect the availability of the new CPUs. On the one hand, AMD claims that the processors will be available at launch already, but on the other, we wouldn’t expect any superior demand for the CPUs worth $1,031 a piece.

The new version of the CPU-Z utility recognizes all the features of Athlon 64 FX-60 correctly:

I would like to stress that the previous versions of this utility that were not familiar with the Athlon 64 FX-60, did see a system like that as a dual-processor system built with a pair of regular Athlon 64 CPUs.