AMD releases dual-core Athlon 64 FX-60

[ROM-DOS]

AMD releases dual-core Athlon 64 FX-60

1/10/2006 11:45:48 AM, by Eric Bangeman

AMD's Athlon 64 FX line has gotten in on the dual-core loving with the release of the Athlon 64 FX-60. Here's the quick low-down, spec wise: each core has 128KB of L1 cache and 1MB of L2 cache. In fact, judging from the transistor count and cache, it appears to use the same "Toledo" core as the high-end Athlon 64 X2 4800+ part. However, the FX-60 is clocked at 2.6GHz and uses slightly less voltage. Like the rest of the 64-bit lineup, the FX-60 is a Socket 939 part.

AMD says the Athlon 64 FX-60 is available immediately, and a handful of manufacturers will be shipping high-end systems with the new CPU, including Velocity Micro and Alienware. The FX-60 is priced at $1,031 per CPU in quantities of 1,000, which means the FX-57 just got a bit less expensive--if you don't mind buying single-core CPUs at this stage of the game. The FX-57 is now US$827and the FX-55 has vanished from the AMD lineup.

According to the numerous reviews that have sprouted on the Internet like dandelions on my front lawn, the FX-60 performs very well. In particular, single-threaded performance is on par with single-core processors across the board. For gaming, it performs a little worse than the Athlon 64 4800+ and the FX-57 in some cases, a bit better in others. It also does quite well on media encoding, although Intel's high-end Pentium Extreme Edition 955 bests it on a couple of tests.

So if you're in the market for bleeding-edge performance from your CPU, check out the FX-60. Keep in mind that this is the end of the line for Socket 939, however. AMD will be moving to the Socket-AM2 platform, which will add DDR2 support for the 64-bit Athlons in all their permutations.

Reviews are available from the usual suspects: The Tech Report (which does a showdown against the Pentium EE 955), Hexus, Anandtech, ExtremeTech, and AMD Zone to name a few.