Hot on the heels of Intel's second-generation dual-core Extreme Edition 955 chip comes AMD's Athlon 64 FX-60. More than just a speed bump to AMD's ultra-high-end FX line, the Athlon 64 FX-60 features two processing cores, bringing the FX series into the modern multicore era.
Upside
Now that AMD's highest-end processor is dual core, we can paint a more straightforward desktop CPU picture. It was previously hard to explain that the Athlon 64 FX-57 was only a single-core CPU yet cost more than AMD's top-of-the-line dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4800+. Now gamers and enthusiasts that invest in an ultra-high-end FX-60 chip can take advantage of all the forthcoming games and applications due to incorporate multicore optimisations. But the FX-60 is not merely an insurance policy for the future; our early tests show the FX-60 is lightning-fast on today's apps, as well.
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Half-Life 2 1,024x768, no AA no AF | Â Â |
On our current suite of single-core and multithreaded benchmarks, the Athlon 64 FX-60 beats all other desktop chips on almost every test, including Intel's new Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 955 introduced at the end of December (the lone exception is a statistical tie with the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ on Half-Life 2).
Of particular note are our DivX 6.1 tests. The recent update to that application saw the introduction of multithreaded code. While Intel's Extreme Edition 955 chip did well on the straight video encoding, it couldn't compete with the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ on multitasking. The Athlon 64 FX-60 not only beat Intel's chip by a larger margin on the multitasking, it also trumped the Extreme Edition 955 on the encode portion.
We're curious to see how both of the new chips will perform on upcoming multithreaded games designed to take advantage of dual-core CPUs processing threads, but the early results favour AMD as strongly now as they did a few months back in our dual-core CPU prizefight.
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