Quantifying the FX60, Part 1Quantifying the FX60, Part 1

But In Practice . . .
Translating the theoretical into the practical is never easy and it doesn’t appear to me that AMD has quite done the best job it could. If you are an AMD aficionado, I’m sure you’ve seen all the testing and read how the FX even creeps past Intel’s new Pentium D 955 Extreme in performance. They’re all true. So is the fact that a person can reasonably outrun a horse in a 100-yard dash.

If I test the FX60 using a video template, one that simply cuts clips from a master video, pastes them together, and then renders them into a final video, this new Athlon is outrageously fast. Quantifying that, it’s almost 30 percent faster than a Pentium 955 Extreme — and that’s with the FX60 clocked at 2.6GHz against the 955 Extreme’s 3.46GHz. If few things in life impress you, this should be on that short list.

What’s actually happening? Well, the hard disk is being read, some processor functions are being used to cut the clips from the original video and then stitch those clips together while the final output is being written back to disk. Although it sounds complex; film editors have been doing it for decades by hand, and while I wouldn’t want to do it, for all intents and purposes, from a computer standpoint, it’s a fairly simple set of tasks. It’s analogous to gaming where it’s the graphics card’s GPU that does most of the heavy lifting and the faster the CPU can turnstile data, the faster the game play will be.

The trick is whether or not it can scale upwards as the CPU and bus workload increases. That’s next time.

Bill O'Brien can be blamed for more than 2,000 articles on computers and technology topics. With his writing partner, Alice Hill, Bill co-authored "The Hard Edge," the longest-running (1992 to 2004) technology column penned by a techno duo. For more, go to www.technudge.com.