Price Guides, May 2005: Processors

Athlon 64

AMD had some big announcements lately. Aside from the dual core stuff, the new “E3” and “E4” stepping chips finally started to make their way onto the retail marketplace. These new chips, dubbed “ Venice” and “ San Diego”, are just slightly newer steppings of the existing 90nm chips, but the finer tuned memory controller and SSE3 instructions are a welcomed addition. Feel free to check out Derek’s initial coverage on K8 E stepping here. If AMD product SKUs have you confused, you might want to briefly check out page two of our AMD CPU update here.

Due to AMD’s incredibly “buyer friendly” [sic] product naming, we had to recently revamp the way our processors were listed in the RTPE. Since die process, cache size, clock speed, stepping and socket size all vary within products that are named the same, we had to start annotating a core name to the end of each product in our database. This is slightly unnecessary if you know AMD’s product SKU strategy well enough, but after doing this for five years, I still don’t have it quite memorized. Just keep these important names in mind:

• Hammer: 1MB (sometimes 512KB due to half cache disabled), 130nm, “C0” Socket 754 and Socket 939
• Newcastle : 512KB, 130nm, “CG” Socket 754 and Socket 939
• Winchester : 512KB, 90nm, “D0” Socket 939
• Venice : 512KB, 90nm, “E3” Socket 939
• San Diego : 1MB, 90nm, “E4” Socket 939

Below are the Socket 754 prices for Athlon 64 processors:


With prices as cheap as they are, if you’re going for a new system, we have to recommend a Socket 939 processor. Not only because the 90nm processors run considerably cooler than their 130nm predecessors, but also because Socket 939 prices are actually more competitive [RTPE: Athlon 64 3200+]! The minor boosts in SSE3 and dual channel memory are just icing on the cake.


The Venice processors grab our pick of the week, even if they cost marginally more than the Winchester variants. Oddly, when Winchester prices didn’t fall even though Venice and San Diego processors started showing up at retail merchants en masse, we started to get the impression that many merchants were just going to continue to sell the chips as “Athlon 64” chips and make no mention of the core features. If there will not be a discount for non-SSE3 90nm processors, then it doesn’t make sense to purchase a non-SSE3 chip. The Winchester Athlon 64 3500+ seems to be the only exception to that generalization. Let’s take a look at the price trends over the last few months:

AMD Athlon 64 (939) 3500+ 512KB Winchester

Although the price is anything but stable, there is a clear indication that prices have reduced back to their original positions since Venice’s arrival in mid-April. We would recommend a Winchester 3200+ [RTPE: ADA3200DIK4BI] or 3000+ [RTPE: ADA3000DIK4BI] over the 3500+ anyway, but if you’re going to go all out, you might as well save $30 in the process.

Athlon 64 X2 preorders are starting to crop up, but there seems to be a lot of indication that Intel will beat them to the desktop market first. On another side note, we have heard several reports about 90nm Athlon 64 processors performing poorly in MSI’s K8N Neo4 product line. We will have more details for you in the near future, but if you are in between motherboards and you are also planning a 90nm purchase, you may want to stay away from the K8N until we can either verify or dispute those K8N reports. Our guess is that some new BIOSes should fix the performance issues.