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The Athlon 64 Model 3000+ was a much-needed CPU in AMD's performance lineup. All we now ask for is a 1.8GHz 512kb L2 cache version priced at around £140. That would cover Intel's present Prescott and Northwood range admirably. We've only evaluated the 32-bit side of the processor. Its attractiveness will be further boosted when Windows XP, in particular, launches the final 64-bit version shortly.
Makes the whole A64 scene that much more tempting. I tested out the Beta Windows 64bit on my laptop (A64 3000+ 1.8 1MB) Was much faster with apps and encoding but a dog for games. Best wait for some driver updates me thinks.
I have one of these AMD64 3000+ babies running in a new box, and concur with the results. Had very little luck with WinXP64 though.
However, I have (slowly) been building Gentoo linux on the same machine, and I am getting very different results with 64bit optimised code. For example, in media encoding (converting CD's to ogg format), its roughly twice as fast as oggenc in 32bit mode.
MySQL performance grows by another 50% compared to 32bit, but then Im getting the odd segfault with mysql 64bit. need to investigate that one.
I just cant believe how faast the desktop is with Gnome 2.4, all compiled from scratch for 64bit, but it is hard to benchmark a desktop. Lets just say, its quick.
Having a few issues getting a stable 64bit povray running (it is poorly written, and takes some effort to compile), that should be interesting.
All up, its remarkably mature for something so new. I strongly recommend that Hexus readers out there put their prejudices aside, and a have a real good play with Linux on this platform - linux+amd64 is truly a quantum leap ahead of anything on the Intel platform.
Have not had this much fun since C64 got surpassed by the Amiga.