Feeling the Squeeze: AMD's Athlon 64 X2 6400 Black Edition
Table of contents
- 1. Feeling the Squeeze: AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Black Edition
- 2. 6200+ - The Model that wasn’t
- 3. Lower Energy Consumption
- 4. Only 6% faster than the 6000+
- 5. Trailing the Core 2 Duo
- 6. Overclocking Potential of up to 3.5 GHz
- 7. Memory Frequency of up to DDR2-880
- 8. Overview of Models and Prices
- 9. Test Setup
- 10. Software Configuration
- 11. Benchmarks and Settings
- 12. Benchmarks - 3D Games: UT 2004, Prey
- 13. Benchmarks - 3D Games: Quake 4, Warhammer
- 14. Benchmarks - 3D Games: Supreme Commander, Serious Sam 2
- 15. Benchmarks – 3D-Rendering: Cinema 4D, 3D-Studio Max
- 16. Benchmarks – Applications: AVG Antivirus, WinRAR
- 17. Benchmarks – Applications: Vista Experience Index
- 18. Benchmarks – Applications: Photoshop, PDF
- 19. Benchmarks – Applications: Deep Fritz
- 20. Benchmarks – Audio Encoding: iTunes, Lame
- 21. Benchmarks – Synthetic: Sandra CPU
- 22. Benchmarks – Synthetic: Sandra Memory
- 23. Benchmarks – Synthetic: Sandra Multimedia
- 24. Benchmarks – Synthetic: PC-Mark
- 25. Benchmarks – Synthetic: 3D-Mark
- 26. Benchmarks – Video Encoding: Xvid, Pinnacle Studio
- 27. Benchmarks – Video Encoding: Adobe Premiere, MainConcept
- 28. Benchmarks - Video Encoding: HDTV, DivX
- 29. Benchmarks - Video Encoding: CloneDVD
- 30. Conclusion
As the world waits with bated breath for AMD to release its first four-core processor, named Phenom, the chipmaker decides to release another dual-core processor – the 3.2 GHz Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Black Edition. To ensure that the new processor catches the customer’s eye, AMD has given it a completely black box and called it the Black Edition.
If the customer decides to buy the tray version instead, as is often the case, the new name will go completely unnoticed, however. Only the black carton of the boxed version carries this designation. The look of the processor itself remains unchanged, though, and it still carries the familiar model number.
We were very impressed with the processor’s overclocking potential, though.
The 6400+ Model is still based on the 90 nm production process, possesses 1 MB of L2 cache per core and has a relatively high energy consumption. The previous top-end model, the Athlon 64 X2 6000+, debuted exactly half a year ago and is also available as an energy efficient model (Athlon 64 X2 6000+ EE). At present it is not known whether AMD is planning to release an EE version of the 6400+. All three models are based on the Windsor core and use the F3 stepping.
Presently, AMD is under enormous time pressure. Intel has been supplying the channel with quad-core processors for several months now. On the other hand, the best AMD has been able to come up with over the last six months is to release an updated processor that runs just 200 MHz faster than the previous model. That equates to a 6.6% theoretical performance improvement.
Either AMD’s production-process refinement has hit a brick wall, or all of the company’s engineers are concentrating their efforts exclusively on the upcoming quad-core models. If that is the case, then it is feasible that this new processor is not really new at all and instead consists of hand-selected parts known to run at higher speeds – as a stop-gap measure until Phenom arrives.
