dual core Opteron & Athlon 64 X2 - Server/Desktop Performance Preview

AnandTech
reviews are in and the new processors from AMD rock! Look for some incredible bargains on AMD single core processors in the next 3 months. I'm already planning my upgrades.

AMD's dual core Opteron & Athlon 64 X2 - Server/Desktop Performance Preview

AMD's margins on their dual core Opteron parts are huge. On average, the second core costs customers over 3x as much as the first core for any of these CPUs. As you will soon see, the performance benefits are definitely worth it, but know that AMD's pricing is not exactly designed to drive dual core into widespread adoption.

What's quite impressive is how competitive the Athlon 64 X2 is across the board. With the Pentium D we had to give up a noticeable amount of single threaded performance (compared to Intel's top of the line Pentium 4 CPUs) in order to get better multithreaded/multitasking performance, but with AMD you don't have to make that sacrifice. Everything from gaming to compiling performance on the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ was extremely solid. In multithreaded/multitasking environments the Athlon 64 X2 is even more impressive; video encoding is no longer an issue on AMD platforms - you no longer have to make a performance decision between great overall performance or great media encoding performance, AMD delivers both with the Athlon 64 X2. Also keep in mind that the performance preview we gave of the Athlon 64 X2 today is actually a very conservative estimate, the shipping Athlon 64 X2 CPUs will run with regular DDR memory and with much faster motherboards - meaning you should be prepared to be impressed even further down the road.