Author: K. Burcham
Date: 22:49:05 01/09/06
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~103890,00.html http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2668&p=9 AMD’s Socket-939 has been the platform of choice almost immediately after its introduction, so it is fitting that the last Socket-939 processor to be released would be the Athlon 64 FX-60. After today’s launch of the FX-60, there will be no faster Socket-939 CPUs produced. Instead, everything else will be Socket-AM2 (the new name for Socket-M2). Next quarter AMD will launch their Socket-AM2 platform along with AM2 versions of the Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2 and the FX-62. Given that the AM2 platform adds DDR2 support, it is entirely feasible that the Athlon 64 FX-62 won’t receive a clock speed bump over the FX-60 and just use the higher bandwidth memory as justification for the higher model number. The fastest single core AMD processor is still the Athlon 64 FX-57 running at 2.8GHz, which AMD will continue to sell alongside the FX-60. But with the clock speed gap between the 2.6GHz dual core FX-60 and the 2.8GHz single core FX-57 a meager 7.6%, you can effectively go to one CPU and get the best single threaded and multithreaded performance. Remember that the best applications that scale with clock speed generally give you a 50% return on every 100% increase in clock speed, so in most of the single threaded cases the FX-57’s performance advantage will be in the 0 - 4% range. But on the flip side, the fact that the FX-60 is a dual core processor will buy it a lot in multithreaded applications. Unfortunately since the FX-60 is still built on the same 90nm Toledo core as the previous X2 processors, overclocking headroom is not that great. With a retail AMD heatsink/fan, the best we could do is 2.8GHz at 1.40V. With more exotic cooling you could probably manage better, but stepping up the voltage all the way up to 1.50V wouldn't yield a 3GHz overclock on air.
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