The 23rd of September, things will start to heat up for real, as this is when AMD will make its release of the Athlon64 processor; the first 64 bit processor aimed at the desktop market. Rumours and speculations of its performance are everywhere, but very few are actually credible. Performance would be that of which we know the least about as of today, as AMD itself has released most of its specifications. However, at Anandtech.com, this was far from enough, and it has thus decided to emulate its performance with an Opteron processor and an nVidia nForce3 motherboard. As it seems, the Athlon64 will start at the frequency of 2.0 GHz, which is what the Opteron was overclocked to.
This “Athlon64 wannabe” test system is taken through a lot of different tests and is compared to both the older Athlon XP and Intel’s Pentium 4.
As usual, the performance differs, but with one certain attribute shining through; namely good performance! The Athlon64 seems indeed to have good conditions before its launch, but drawing conclusions from merely this test, this early, feels rather daft, as it isn’t a real Athlon64 being tested.
Another thing one should keep in mind is that only the Athlon64 FX will be equipped with DualDDR support as the Opteron. This is something the standard model Athlon64 lacks.
The whole test can be found at Anandtech.com.
