Any advantage yet to building a system around the new Athlon 64
processors? I just noticed that MWave is now offering them... and it's
almost time for me to build a new system.
There's tons of advantages. The question is more one of timing. Are
you an early adopter or not? And when will it _really_ be available?
Surely, I think it should impact the choices anyone makes, getting a
new system now or soon. One way or other.
One advice is not to invest too much money in any 32-bit technology.
- Like DON'T ever buy a P4ExtremeEdition, or even any 3.2GHz, or a
Prescott the very minute it's released at premium prices... Be cool.
If you buy 32-bit, buy cheap, like 2.8GHz or AMD. That's my advice.
Early adopters always face some early snags. It's not different this
time. nForce3 seems to have some technical problems, luckily there's
an alternative that seems to do better, VIA K8T800.
Then AMD didn't seem to have the target for cpu specs entirely right.
The usual 64-bit memorybus proved to be a considerable bottleneck.
There's two different desktop 64-bit Athlons: Athlon64 and Athlon64FX.
The FX looks to be more desirable with a 128-bit wide memorybus. It
also looks to be more expensive. Currently, being a late adaption of
the Opteron, it also needs ECC ram.
Well, as exciting as the A64FX performance is, I would buy the cheap
one. Point of 64-bit computing is massive ram, and you've got to
afford that as well.
Any early adopters will first have to use it as a 32-bit cpu, with the
usual 32-bit OS, since WindowsXP64 is not quite ready yet.
As a 32-bit cpu, the Athlon64 should be "overall" faster than anything
else. In any way, damn fast, and you're not really paying anything
more for it than for any other fast 32-bit cpu. So in a way, it
doesn't make much sense buying another highend 32-bit cpu instead. I
think that's what AMD is figuring as well, and we will not see any
further development at the high end AthlonXP.
Later with a 64-bit OS, you might see significant further advantages
on old 32-bit apps. It's too early to say for sure, until we see
WindowsXP64 in the flesh. But there might be technical reasons for
expecting even higher performance. The speed at which services runs
for example. And the OS memoryhandling. I have been led to believe,
WindowsXP64 will provide old Win32 apps with a 4GB process space, even
though the Win32 program modelll stipulates only 2GB. - That remains
to be seen, but that is pretty exciting IMO.
We will have to wait a while for 64-bit apps. Intel are using their
mighty PR machinery to suggest to everyone, but journalists in
particular, that we will have to wait until 2006-08. That would really
suit them, I suppose. There are lots of foundations ready though, both
MS and Linux. So I think the Intel prophecies should be seen as an
attempt to put brakes on things. Looking at ram prices, and hd
capacity, the time for 64-bit could very well be pretty much right
now.
64-bit apps finally introduces an entirely new ballgame. The almost
unlimited process space of 64-bit adressing makes a lot of outrageous
things suddenly very feasable. If the Athlon64 hits off as a gaming
cpu - and due to it's gaming performance it sort of should - we're
going to see 64-bit games, and they are going to be something
completely else.
Even now, a game like Morrowind would have done very well do have been
64-bit. So don't think for moment that there is no immediate use for
64-bit adressing.
Expect huge complex worlds. Probably algorithmically generated. It
could be a new dimension in gaming. A revolution as big or bigger than
3D-graphics/gaming. Don't expect to see 32-bit to hang in there for
very long, once 64-bit gaming takes off.
The same is true about a lot of things. 64-bits are really going to
open up a lot of possibilities. For instance, you can put a full
feature length movie into memory space, _uncompressed_. And you're
still only using less than 0.000001 % of your process space.
ancra
