Introduction
Hector Ruiz, AMD CEO, poses with brain transplant, yesterday
The Athlon 64 FX, pinnacle of AMD's consumer processor offerings, now has two cores. Two cores, to more effectively run a modern OS, is why you see Hector Ruiz, AMD's CEO and Chairman of the Board, seemingly powered by one. Yes, the CPU is actually so good that it can replace the human brain.
Now to give the majority of the game away on the first page is a journalistic crime, especially on the web, since you offer your reader little incentive to pick up the rest of the tale, now they know the fairytale ending. To further give it away in the opening paragraph, under a Photoshopped picture of the CEO that supplied the product for review, probably isn't the best idea a technology hack can have.
Not to be deterred by the threat of the sack, my feeble initial fumblings on this review of the AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 for HEXUS.core have a point, I promise. You see there's not much suspense to hold with this new CPU. The mystique of whether or not the next Athlon 64 FX would be single or dual core was dashed a while ago, and really it was obvious if you think about it. Once you understood that it was dual-core, then going on to figure out the target clock frequency was a piece of cake, given Athlon 64 X2 4800+.
With that information, extrapolating performance from the 4800+ is a fairly simple task, one which would at least get you in the ballpark. However, there's still a few important questions to answer, giving me the get out of gaol card I need for these early heinous of crimes against copy writing and image manipulation.
Firstly, is it better than Athlon 64 FX-57 for the target market. Notice the better adjective. Faster is the wrong way to go about the analysis, since single versus dual-core with non-matching clock frequencies will always throw up differing answers, depending on what you run.
Secondly, does it best Intel's latest bit of competing high-end madness, the Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 processor.
Food for thought. So, where to begin? While most reading this article will already have an idea of FX-60's basic attributes, let us get them down on the page for posterity and talk about some of the finer details.
