Thoughts
Pertaining to the present, AMD's Athlon 64 FX-53 is a strong performer across the board. Benchmarks conducted with a 32-bit Windows XP installation showed that it has the measure of a Pentium 4 3.4GHz Northwood Extreme Edition. What's most troubling for the FX-53 is the excellent performance exhibited by AMD's own S754 (for how much longer!) Clawhammer CPU. There's no question that the FX-53 is faster in every benchmark, but is it fast enough to justify a price tag that'll undoubtedly be twice as much as the '3400's. We're not seeing the kind of advances that Intel has had by whacking another 2MB of on-chip cache on to a regular Northwood.Real promise will be realised when a number of key applications will be properly compiled for 64-bit running. Most popular ones are having to be accommodated via the use of a compatibility mode (64-32-bit, Windows on Windows), and that introduces unwanted overheads. We probably wouldn't opt for an FX-53 right now unless absolute performance was the #1 criteria. For AMD's intended FX-53 market, cost is a secondary issue, so it's well-placed to fulfill its brief.
Intel's Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition put the onus back on to AMD's shoulders. We'd call the heavyweight fight pretty even now, although the balance may swing entirely in AMD's favour when 64-bit computing isn't just a thought but a full-blown, usable reality. The trouble is, we were saying the same thing back in the FX-51 review (September 2003). AMD's just keeping that as a bonus, flashy PR feature, for 32-bit performance is damn hot.
