What makes the Athlon 64 so good?

[Snoop65]

My best friend and I have been having a debate about the what makes the AMD Athlon 64 series processors so good. He thinks its because they are 64 and 32 bit capable. I say that's not true because almost all current programs are 32 bit and that the Athlon would still kick ass even if it didn't do 64 bit. What do you think?

 

[G35x]

Well 64 the old ones, like the the 7 socket, was good for gaming, because it had a built in memory controller..But the intel cor dueo owns any amd chip right now..

 

[Snoop65]

I know the Intel's are the thing to have now, but was it the fact that they had 64 bit technology that made them so good or would they still kick ass without the 64 bit technology?

 

[DJ-CHRIS1]

The 64 bit technolagy has no effect towards their peformance in 32 bit applications

 

[kchi55]

64bit tech wasn't the reason why AMD had the lead in gaming for a while. it was the architecture of the chips itself. the amd chip had a memory controller which surpassed intels methods of having extra communication within the processor which caused the performance deficiency.

 

[Snoop65]

I thought so. It didn't make sense to me that 64 bit capabilities helped 32 bit

 

[Snoop65]

does anybody else have more details to add?

 

[alvino]

Athlon 64's performed well because of the K8's architecture. Short pipelines, more instructions per clock and the integrated memory controller helps. One of the reason why Intel's Core 2 Duo performs so well is that they used some of AMD's strategies like the shorter pipelines and higher IPC. The Prescott core didn't do as well because it relied on a high clock speed and it was highly inefficient.

 

[ownage]

K8's are tweaked K7's The main difference between K7s and K8s is that K8s have an IMC, have longer pipes, and a couple architecture tweaks here and there.

 

[alvino]

Pretty much.