Memory and single-threaded tests
The BIOS issues explained by AMD were clearly making our memory latency and bandwidth results rather lower than they should be. We expect to see the latency problem fixed with the final shipping BIOS. Memory bandwidth should be even better than an Athlon 64 FX-62, as a processor can in theory load data from two memory controllers in parallel. But that clearly isn't working yet, and the Quad FX is currently offering only slightly better bandwidth than Intel's Core 2 processors.
The Quad FX's memory issues were also clearly ruining performance with our PiFast synthetic benchmark. It should be achieving slightly better scores than the slower-clocked Athlon 64 FX-62, but instead it's slightly slower.
Our cryptography benchmark was the first sign that Quad FX has some serious horsepower, although this is only a single-threaded benchmark. The Athlon 64 FX-62 is already capable in this test, and the FX-74's extra 200MHz give it an even better score.
