Three Athlon 64 processors at launch, says AMD

SAN FRANCISCO -- Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said there were three variants of its Clawhammer Athlon 64 at a launch for the 64-bit processor on Tuesday (September 23, 2003): the Athlon 64 FX-51 intended for computers running PC games, the Athlon 64 Desktop and the Athlon 64 Mobile.

The variants are all manufactured in a 130-nanometer silicon-on-insulator manufacturing process technology and based on the Clawhammer 64-bit processing core. The company claimed that the Athlon 64 processors outperformed an Intel Pentium 4 operating at 3.06-GHz at a variety of tasks by between 3 percent and 22 percent.

The AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 processor, which AMD said operates at a maximum clock frequency of 2.2-GHz, is priced at $733 in 1,000-unit quantities.

The AMD Athlon 64 processor is available for desktop computing as a Model 3200+ and is priced at $417 in 1,000-unit quantities.

Although the model number 3200+ is used to indicate a system clock frequency of 2.2-GHz in the Athlon XP range of 32-bit processors, in the Athlon 64 range it is used along with a 2.0-GHz maximum clock frequency.

When intended for notebook computers the Athlon 64 is available with model numbers 3200+ and 3000+ priced at $417 and $278 in 1,000-unit quantities, respectively. In the Athlon XP series the 3000+ model has a maximum clock frequency of 2.167-GHz but within the the Athlon 64 series it coincides with a clock frequency of 1.8-GHz, AMD said.

All three chips have a 1-Mbyte 16-way associative second-level cache and 64-kbyte instruction and data primary caches.

The Athlon 64 FX includes one 16-bit HyperTransport bus and a 128-bit DDR2 interface to synchronous DRAM. The part comes in a 940-pin ceramic micro pin grid array package. The Athlon 64 includes one 16-bit HyperTransport bus, a 64-bit DDR2 interface and comes in 754-pin micro pin grid array.

Datasheets that could be found here when this story was first posted, although the datasheet for the Athlon 64 FX erroneously stated that the part has three Hypertransport buses. The block diagram shows a single HyperTransport bus.

An additional differentiation between the parts is that the Athlon 64 FX-51 requires registered memory of PC1600 to PC3200 formats, whereas the Athlon 64 copes with unbuffered memory modules in the same formats. One difference between the Desktop and Mobile version of the Athlon 64 is that the mobile version does not support the highest speed of DDR memory module, the PC3200.