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AMD Athlon 64 FX-57
AMD's move to 90nm has been well documented by all the usual suspects, us included. Athlon X2, Athlon 64 and Sempron are all available today, produced on that process. The missing piece was a new 90nm Athlon 64 FX. The well-heeled gamer's chip of choice and the enthusiast's most coveted plaything, the Athlon 64 FX represents the pinnacle of consumer x86 technology. Today sees the launch of AMD's first 90nm Athlon 64 FX. Clocked at a heady 2800MHz using the San Diego core, FX-57 should be the fastest x86 processor ever created. I've taken the CPU for a spin to find out.
San Diego brings SSE3 support to Athlon 64 FX for the first time, along with support for mismatched DIMM sizes in its memory controller, more efficient use of memory compared to Clawhammer and more performance from its data prefetcher, which pulls data out of system memory into the processor's caches, in advance of it being needed.
A lower supply voltage likely means a BIOS update for the majority of boards and board vendors will likely roll in FX-57 BIOS support with their Venice and Toledo 90nm changes. Basically a Clawhammer at 2800MHz with SSE3 and some memory controller and prefetcher tweaks, using around eight million more transistors to get there.
Want to see if the high-clocked promise of a single-core 1MiB AMD64 CPU at 2.8GHz holds true? You'll want to click here. Before I go, keep an eye out on HEXUS in coming weeks for performance scaling well into the mid 3GHz range, using this new processor. It overclocks fairly well.....
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