Well, Socket AM2 isn’t going to set the world on fire with its amazing speed boost compared to Socket 939. The move to DDR2 memory is an upgrade, but a very minor one in terms of overall performance. Memory bandwidth is obviously, stupendously improved with Socket AM2, and memory latency is actually a little lower, too. Unfortunately, these changes only translate into tangible gains in a handful of our application benchmarks. Games and video encoding tests seem to make the most use of Socket AM2’s additional bandwidth, as well as our speech recognition benchmark and a few others. Many other applications show no improvement at all. Socket AM2 does bring lower power consumption at idle than Socket 939, but that advantage seems to evaporate when the CPU is busy, in spite of the lower TDP ratings for the newer CPUs.
For now, that’s good enough. Intel’s Pentium D and Extreme Edition processors simply can’t keep up with the Athlon 64 X2. The two new speed grades, the Athlon 64 X2 5000 and FX-62, only extend AMD’s performance lead, and the FX-62 dominates the current crop of desktop PC processors.
