A64 FX vs A64 XX00?

[vanish]

What causes the difference between the A64 FX cpus and other A64 models? I've heard people saying that you can "overclock athlon 64 3200 to speeds faster than FX". Personally I don't believe that this gives better performance than the FX (you gotta be paying 600 bucks more for something). Am I right?

 

[FishTankX]

Unlocked multiplier
1MB of cache (Some A64 xx00's have this)
dual channel memory (All S939 CPU's have this)
Unbelievable stock performance

 

[Mik3y]

Originally posted by: vanish
What causes the difference between the A64 FX cpus and other A64 models? I've heard people saying that you can "overclock athlon 64 3200 to speeds faster than FX". Personally I don't believe that this gives better performance than the FX (you gotta be paying 600 bucks more for something). Am I right?

nope. it's true that you can overclock to faster then fx-55 speeds, but what keeps a person from ocing the fx? overclocking is never guaranteed, which means that you can get 100 cpu's and oc them all and only 1 may actually oc to fx-55 speeds (just an example). the 3200+ and 3500+ oc's technically the same as the 3000+, as people have gotten it to 2.6ghz on air. pretty good performance for only a $175 cpu. dont forget that you would also need very good ram and a good ocing motherboard.

 

[vanish]

but does clock speed really matter? i thought performance was based on performance per clock cycle (i mean of course you can match the speed, if you count by that intel has everyone pwned on a string); is there a difference there?

 

[Mik3y]

clockspeed isnt an entirely accurate method of comparing or determining speed between different cored cpu's. cpu's are built on a pipline based architecure. basically, speed is determined by how fast data is transferred from one end of the pipeline to the other. note that amd and intel uses different length pipleines; amd utilizes a series of short pipelines and intel utilizes a series of long pipelines. as in relation to physics, the longer the distance, the higher the frequency is required to match the speed of short pipelines in going from one end of a pipeline to the other. this is why amd cpu's have much lower frequencies then intel cpu's and amd still performs on par or better then intel. generally speaking, amd does more work per clock cycle then intel does. also, amd does more operations per cycle and intel has more cycle's per second. i hope this makes sense.