LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Moderator Joined: 05 Dec 2000 Posts: 5941 Location: USA

JustAnEngineer wrote:
So, you could spend $569 for the Athlon64 (or $585 with heatsink & fan) and motherboard or you could spend $745 for the Pentium4 and motherboard. Of course, the Athlon64 lags way behind the Pentium4 in number of blue aliens and blue men shown on TV.

The Athlon64 3000+ at $278 will be an even greater value - now that's what I'm talking about - w Big Smile

f!

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

Olive wrote:
correct me if i am wrong... but to truely benefit from a 64-bit processor... don't you need 64-bit applications? I know operating systems come in the 64-bit flavor.. but what applications are coded as such? I would assume certain database applications, and other enterprise level applications that have been using the Itanium for something like 2 years now... but what's out there for the "home user?"

The advantage with 64bit computing is that you can easily access more than 2G of memory. So you could run for instance all the installed programs[1]1 at the same time (most of them sleeping so they don't use cpu time) which would cut back startup time of programs to almost instantly(moving the mouse back to the right position would take longer) Bootup time of the computer would be a bit long, but with mram that also wouldn't be a problem because you never do a real cold boot

[1] programs here exclude the only type of program that is gigantic:GAMES

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

hrbib21 wrote:
Yes, but all applications will benefit to some degree. Your comp will run faster just by installing a 64 chip. To truly benefit, software would have to be rewritten.

On another note, would you have to buy a new mobo to use this chip? If so, what are some of the mobo's that are compatible?

In my opinion the larger (virtuel) memory size is what is the true benefit and for that programs don't have to be rewritten

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

Olive wrote:
hrbib21 wrote:
Yes, but all applications will benefit to some degree. Your comp will run faster just by installing a 64 chip.

ehhh... a 64-bit chip can use large amounts of memory more efficently... yes. But being a 64-bit chip has little to do with FSB or processor speeds. I'd say the over all benefits will be minimal at best. Granted... you need the chip available before you can make the software...

Is there some kind of 64-bit roadmap anyway? when do they plan on writting of 32-bit computing?

When do they write of 16-bit computing. I wouldn't be surprised if windowsXP still contains 16-bit software and 16 bit internal programs will probably run untill the sun goes supernova.

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

JustAnEngineer wrote:
smokinAMD wrote:
Asus has several motherboards that are compatiable, one with an nForce3 Pro chipset, and the other with the VIA KT800 chipset. And not too surprising, nForce once again kicks the living crap out of VIA.

Not in the reviews that I read, it didn't. Except for an apparent AGP issue on one board, the KT800 performed better than the NForce3. Of course, most of us have had bad experiences with VIA chipsets at one time or another.

Here's a good review:
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2003q3/athlon64/index.x?pg=1

Bad experience with VIA chipsets. Really Smile

Moderator Joined: 05 Dec 2000 Posts: 5941 Location: USA

csign wrote:
Bad experience with VIA chipsets. Really

I have more problems with operating systems then I've had with VIA Wink

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

But that is because SiS makes Operating systems too.(they had a deal with corel to distribut Corel linux)

Moderator Joined: 05 Dec 2000 Posts: 5941 Location: USA

SiS rocked the 486 world Wink

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

It chrashed the party Smile

Posted: Wed Oct 01, 2003 3:42 pm Post subject:

Fido posted this Athlon64 link on the front page:
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1662.2/?18395

It sure looks good, although it might be a bit of an expensive upgrade from what you're running at the moment.

Posted: Wed Oct 01, 2003 6:06 pm Post subject:

JustAnEngineer wrote:
Fido posted this Athlon64 link on the front page:
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1662.2/?18395

It sure looks good, although it might be a bit of an expensive upgrade from what you're running at the moment.

MMmmm.......silicon. Very Happy

Stray Dog Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 37

I'm sure everyone's asleep by now, but I had to drop this in...

I'm not well educated on precessors. Isn't a 64 bit chip supposed to run twice as fast a 32 bit processor?? What's the deal? I understand that applications have to be made to support the new chips. But, once they do, won't the decimate the old chips? Educate a pup. Peace.

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

The big difference is that a 64bit chip can handle more than 2G(or 4G) of memory with tricks. And 2G sounds asif you would never use it but in 4 years no software will run on anything with less than 2G of memory

Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2003 3:11 am Post subject:

A 64-bit processor working with 64-bit instructions and data will be faster than a 32-bit processor trying to do the same thing. However, there is almost no x86-64 code available yet. We're seeing Opteron/AthlonFX and Athlon64 running 32-bit x86 code.

Another big improvement of AMD's x86-64 is that AMD decided to double the number of named registers. This can allow much quicker program execution if they are compiled so that instructions are executed on registers instead of on main memory locations.

Larger secondary cache helps speed things up since there is less delay (latency) in accessing cache than main memory. A massive Level 3 cache is the trick behind Intel's P4EE (Emergency Edition?, Extremely Expensive?). With a P4 Xeon MP's huge cache, many programs don't have to access main memory very often.

Finally, Opteron/AthlonFX has a super-duper memory controller built into the chip, so latencies to main memory are exceptionally low for a desktop processor and throughput is high. Programs that are often bottlenecked by memory access will benefit greatly.

These folks sometimes get a bit technical on CPU stuff:

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000253
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=55000252
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=55000251

Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2003 10:36 am Post subject:

csign wrote:
The big difference is that a 64bit chip can handle more than 2G(or 4G) of memory with tricks. And 2G sounds asif you would never use it but in 4 years no software will run on anything with less than 2G of memory

actually... 32bit chips can access up to 4 gig of physical ram on a truely 32bit memory controller... the basic calculation is 2 to the power of bits - value in KB below 32bit and raw value above 32bit or something like that

16bit cieling was 64meg (with tricks using 1k blocks)
32bit - 4gig
64bit (theoretical) - 16 Terabytes
(current AMD64 using 48bit) - 256 gig
one of the articles posted on the main page (9/23/03 in the archives I think) pointed this out... I may be remembering wrong... but I know the general idea is there.