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Conclusion
In many ways, the Athlon 64 FX-51 is ahead of its time, Windows XP-64 is still only in its beta stages, and the drivers appear still further behind. For anybody who had eagerly anticipated the Athlon 64, this may sound somewhat disappointing, in reality, however, the Athlon 64 FX-51 shows incredibly strong performance already in a 32-bit Windows XP environment.
Admittedly, there were benchmarks that were won by the P4, in one case, even the Athlon XP3200+ pulled ahead of the Athlon 64 FX-51 but that one turned out the exception rather than the norm. In most cases, the lead of the Athlon 64 over the competition has been huge, especially when considering that we are often looking at composite scores that do not scale with e.g. the frames per second in games.
One other issue about the Athlon 64 is its sensitivity to memory latencies. Of course, benchmarks that do not depend on memory will not reveal any differences here either, that is, some of the still image rendering benchmarks are not even using a lot of memory. It certainly makes sense that in a platform that thrives on reduced controller latencies, the memory latencies at the back-end of the command chain weigh in much more heavily than on a platform that is already burdened with a lot of delays on the controller level. This will certainly be even more interesting on the single channel Athlon 64 platform that runs on un-registered DIMMs since the extra latency of the registers will fall away. If this additional reduction in address decoding is passed down unattenuated to the initial access latencies, the single channel solution may have an additional edge that compensates for the lower bandwidth.
Some benchmarks like e.g. the original POVRAY (not shown) showed somewhat absurd scores with the Athlon 64 FX-51 trailing the XP3200+ by some 30% but it is always possible to find the "impossible" benchmark. A honorable mentioning of the fact, therefore, should suffice, no need to raise flags where none are necessary.
Within the next few months, or hopefully weeks, we will see more 64-bit software hitting the shelves, hopefully, we'll also see some improvements of the 64-bit drivers and a wider variety within the hardware platforms. Chipsets from VIA, SIS and ALI are ready to roll and in many ways, it is a new beginning in a virgin market that, after a while will start to self-regulate. Already now, the Athlon 64 is an exciting product that has exceeded our wildest expectations and it can only become better with more mature software.
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