Question for Athlon 64 owners

Hi friends,I'm trying to understand the difference between the Newcastle core and the ClawHammer core. I want to buy an Athlon 64 3400+, but I don't know which core would be best. The ClawHammer runs at 2.2 GHz and has a 1MB L2 cache, while the Newcastle runs at 2.4GHz, but has only a 512K L2 cache. Pricewise, there's less than $20 between the two, which is pretty insignificant when you are talking $300 for the chip (at Newegg.com.Besides the obvious, is there any difference between the two? Which do you recommend any why? This is going into my game computer, by the way, which runs MSTS mostly - and occassionally sees a little productive work! ). I've been lurking the forums at AMD's website and there appears to be as many opinions as there are posters. The general consensus I seem to get is "close your eyes and pick one."
I plan on putting this into an ASUS K8N-E Deluxe motherboard with the NVIDIA nForce 3 250Gb chipset. I haven't decided on a videp card yet - I'm waiting to see how the industry shakes out in the next few months. Lots of new stuff on the way which should affect prices dramatically.Thanks and have a great day -Larry Steiner

I don't suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it!

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RE: Question for Athlon 64 owners, Ben D, Aug-16-04, 10:15 AM, (1) RE: Question for Athlon 64 owners, chucksc, Aug-16-04, 11:02 AM, (2) RE: Question for Athlon 64 owners, sniper297, Aug-16-04, 11:09 AM, (3) RE: Question for Athlon 64 owners, chucksc, Aug-16-04, 06:05 PM, (7) RE: Question for Athlon 64 owners, chucksc, Aug-16-04, 11:35 AM, (4) RE: Question for Athlon 64 owners, CPR_Malice_96th, Aug-16-04, 12:06 PM, (5) RE: Question for Athlon 64 owners, sniper297, Aug-16-04, 02:37 PM, (6) RE: Question for Athlon 64 owners, Vulcan Foundry, Aug-16-04, 06:43 PM, (8) RE: Question for Athlon 64 owners, Gecko, Aug-16-04, 07:32 PM, (9)

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So 2.4GB is the latest speed for a computer these days? I thought they had 3 Giggers by now! -BeaverMon is no more, Ben D is here to stay-
-BETA Tester for the PO&N Route-

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LAST EDITED ON Aug-16-04 AT 11:03 AM (EST)

>So 2.4GB is the latest speed for a computer these days? I
>thought they had 3 Giggers by now!
Ben, FWIW there are two competing Processor design philosophies now.Intel has very deep pipelines, very high clock rates, allows you to split the CPU into 2 virtual CPUs (Hyper-Threading) and limits the amount of work done per clock cycle - If what you want to do is covered by those optimizations then this is the CPU for you...
The short comings mainly center around the fact that with deep pipelines a cache miss, especially due to branch mis-prediction, results in a significant loss of cycles invalidating cache contents and reloading the pipes.... And Hyper-Threading is only useful if the application you are using (and MSTS isn't one of them) is optimized to run in an MP or Multi-Threaded environment)...
As far as 64 bit computing goes, Intel started off by re-inventing the CPU and abandoned the x86 instruction set... Consequently their initial 64 bit CPU offerings was compatible with nothing and other than a very limited market for servers never really caught on. The success of the AMD 64bit program caught them with their drawers down and they are now scrambling to catch up... AMD has taken a very different path - They do more work per cycle by a significant margin than Intel... This results in the performance anomaly that a 2.2 Gig AMD Athlon/XP runs most standard benchmarks within 10% or so of a 3.0 to 3.2 Gig Intel P4... Hence the performance rating of 3200 assigned to a 2.2 Gig CPU....
The primary shortcomings of the AMD architecture are that it usually is a much more complex piece and uses significantly more power and generates more heat. Also if your application IS optimized to use a narrow group of instructions and is optimized not to branch very often and as a consequence will run well in a straight line then you will be limited by the lower physical clock speeds of the AMD CPUs... Note that this condition is very rare in the real world as opposed to the benchmark worls...
AMD's great hope is their Athlon 64 (and FX) series of cpus...
With lots of internal changes to improve performance the biggest single differentiator is that AMD chose to incorporate the standard x86 (32 bit) instructions as the basis of the instruction set of their 64 bit machine and "tacked on" the 64 bit instructions... What this does is allow you to run existing 32 bit code seamlessly and with no performance penalty and then to run 64 bit extended x86 code!
You can run a mix of 32 bit code and 64 bit code simultaneously with little or no overhead in switching between them.... This has tremendous performance implications for all the existing machines out there and is the reason Intel is all but abandoning their 64 bit initiative and switching to this model....Microsoft has bought into the AMD 64 bit extended architecture and forced Intel to also because it allows you to have a 64 bit OS (Larger Address ranges and faster more accurate math just for openers) and still run all your existing Apps, thus saving you the cost of having to buy everything new....
This really works! When I upgraded this machine from an Athlon/XP-2400 to an Athlon/64-3400 all I literally did was swap my motherboard and reboot..... No problems at all! I then went back and upgraded my video card and memory at my leisure. When it made economic sense for me (I watched for Sales)... MSTS was running Error Free (or as close to that as the Kuju code allows) within 5 mins. of me booting the machine! No wonder Intel is having a hissy fit! BTW, I did build a Disk with Windows/XP-64 beta on it and ran some tests but chose not to use it for production as the driver base at that time (February) was not mature enough for me to feel comfortable.... I.E. the beta drivers were older versions then I already ran and were not as robust as the 32 bit versions at the time...As far as the speed rating on the 64s go....
My 3400 (and the FX series like Sharon some others have) runs at a much lower clock speed than the speed rating (I think that is an AMD feature by now)... In my case it runs at 2.2 Gig and produces 32 bit benchmarks in the same range as a P4 3.4 gig.... Preliminary benchmarks that I have seen suggest that in a 64 bit environment this CPU's speed rating will exceed 4000 or 4 Gig....Hope I didn't bore you with all this trivia?Chuck Schneider
Chief Cook, Bottle Washer and (Virtual) CEO

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Unless you hit the Hoosier Powerball, best bang for your buck is to look at the top end bleeding edge state of the art, sigh once or twice, then go down the list to the biggest price break. I bought a Palomino 1600+ when the first 2000+ CPUs came out, at the time it ran something like 2000+, $330, 1900+, $290, 1800+, $260, and the 1600+ had just dropped to $190. Obviously if you're a zillionaire you can spend $900 bucks on something that will cost $200 bucks three months from now, but most of us need to be a little more frugal.As for the difference in the cache size, quote from an article;"A look at the AMD data sheet shows that doubling the L2 cache will add a model rating of 300 points, as the Athlon XP 2700+ works at the same speed as the XP 3000+. We thought this was significant and have conducted very comprehensive examinations and tests relating to this."Here's the link to the whole article:http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030210/index.html

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The lack of a winning lottery ticket is why I got a 3400 when the FX51s were available and if I was doing it now I'd probably go for a 3700....Chuck Schneider
Chief Cook, Bottle Washer and (Virtual) CEO

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Larry either core works fine...
One has a slightly higher clock speed of 2.4 Gig and only 512kb of L2 cache and the other has 1 MB of cache and a slower clock of 2.2 Gig...The real question is which interface you will use...AMD now has 2 (or 3 if you count the Opeteron Server chips and the very early FX51s like I think Sharon has) to choose from...The socket 754 has an integrated single channel memory controller but supports DDR400 memory (and above if you can believe the overclockers).... This socket also supports the latest revision of the 32 bit Athlons just coming on line now... This would be the value version of the CPU/MoBo combination... For MOST applications and games you are fine with this one...
Currently you can get a AMD64-3000 and MoBo at NewEgg for under $300.00!
CPUs supported are Athlon/XP 32bit Sempron cores and Athlon/64..The socket 939 is the high end performance interface and is designed for applications where performance is the driving requirement not cost! The primary difference is that this is a dual channel memory interface with the attendant increase in memory bandwidth. Note that this is probably only a 10% differentiator at this time because the processors are so fast and the AMD CPU cache management scheme is so good...
CPUs supported are Athlon/64s and Athlon/64-FXs...FYI, there is also a socket 940 which is basically a multiprocessor server interface with multichannel memory..
The FX51 which was initially released on this interface was really an Opeteron 1xx series chip with the M-P interface disabled...
All AMD 64bit M-P servers use this interface..Differences in the Processors themselves are in a nutshell;Athlon/64 is available is both socket 754 and socket 939!
This CPU was originally released with 1mb of cache but process improvements have allowed that to be decreased to 512kb and with a slight clock bump no effect on performance.
Speeds available on socket 754 are 2800, 3000, 3200, 3400, 3700!
Speeds available on socket 939 are 3500 and 3800 reflecting the performance bump of dual channel memory....Athlon/64-FX is available in both socket 940 and socket 939 interfaces...More trivia! LOL!
Chuck Schneider
Chief Cook, Bottle Washer and (Virtual) CEO

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So where does my Commodore 64 fit in to all this ?

Tim Kent – 96th_Malice - Winnipeg Canada

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Oops, sorry Tim, I dumped your Clunkadore 64 into my Trash 80!

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>So where does my Commodore 64 fit in to all this ?
>
>
Right next to my Sinclair Spectrum ZX87 or whatever the hell it was, I can't quite remember now.

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I use mine to run my garden railroad, UP uses it for dispatch!
George

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