AMD Athlon 64 vs Intel Pentium P4 EE

review posted September 2003

<< Overview of AMD's 64 bit processors

The below links are to reviews of:

AMD vs Intel
Athlon 64 vs Intel P4
AMD Athlon XP vs AMD Athlon 64
Athlon 64 vs Athlon FX 51
Athlon FX51 vs Pentium 4 EE
Athlon 64 vs Athlon FX51 vs Intel Pentium P4 EE
Athlon FX-51 vs Intel Pentium P4 Extreme Edition
Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition vs AMD Athlon 64 FX-51

At Tom's Hardware

Tom's Conclusion: Thanks to its ideal configuration and use of the best components, the P4 3.2 in the Extreme Edition (actually a Xeon labeled 'P4') wins the performance crown. Its former gaming weakness against the Athlon 64 has been ironed out by the 2 MB L3 cache. The AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 is only marginally slower. Especially with 3D games, both the 1 MB L2 cache as well as the fast memory access (HyperTransport) help it decisively beat competitor Intel P4 3.2 (standard edition).

Caveats: Bear in mind this was done prior to Microsoft's release of the final 64 bit version of Windows and with a dearth of 64 bit testing software.

At Anand Tech:

AMD Athlon 64 vs AMD Athlon 64 FX-51
32 bit and 64 bit tests
Athlon 64 in 32 bit vs 64 bit

Anandtech's conclusion:

(Using Linux, in 64 bit tests) ...The performance improvement here is astounding - in 64-bit mode the Athlon 64 FX managed to finish the encode 34% quicker than in 32-bit mode...  if AMD can actually get 64-bit applications and a compatible OS from Microsoft out in the market then the recommendations become much more positive for AMD. Until then, it's wait and see...

At HardOCP:

Conclusion: The Athlon 64 3200+ and Athlon 64 FX 51 should be considered AMD engineering marvels. Kudos to the engineers at AMD for their hard work on the K8 core; they certainly deserve it.