X-bit labs

AMD Athlon 64 3800+ CPU: E3 Processor Core aka Venice at the Door (page 14)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 04/03/2005 | 04:06 PM ]

Conclusion

Well, we have just introduced to you one of the first Athlon 64 processors on the new Venice core (E3 core revision). AMD engineers will most likely be using this core for their processors for a long time. That is why a Venice based processor will very soon become a regular component of an AMD Athlon 64 based system. Today Venice is still regarded as a new product boasting a few important advantages compared with the previous cores such as Winchester and Newcastle.

Among these advantages I would first of all like to mention SSE3 instructions support, which makes Athlon 64 look not any weaker than Pentium 4 Prescott from the SIMD instructions support point of view. Unfortunately, we failed to see any dramatic performance improvement from SSE3 support this time, however, we still hope for the best :) SSE3 support will most probably play its part to the advantage of Athlon 64 later, besides, it is not that bad to have something in reserve anyway.

The new Athlon 64 on Venice core also boast enhanced memory controller. Besides a slight performance improvement, Athlon 64 became more tolerant to various DIMM module configurations. Venice based CPUs have finally learned to work with four double-side memory modules supporting 400MHz.

But the most important advantage of the Athlon 64 processors based on Venice core is the significantly higher frequency potential. This opened new horizons for further AMD processor family development, at the same time giving overclockers got new opportunities for building high-performance systems on the far not the most expensive processors.

As for the drawbacks of the new Venice core, there are hardly any. In other words, if you are planning to buy a Socket 939 CPU, then you definitely have to go for the new core. That’s for sure.

And in conclusion I would like to offer you a nice graph showing the performance advantages of the Athlon 64 processor on Venice core over their fellows on the previous generation cores aka Newcastle and Winchester.