I’ve been watching a debate on a local forum about which A64 cores are what and as far as I understand it it goes as follows.
Winchester is the oldest with no SSE3
Venice and San Diego both have SSE3
Clawhammer 3500 is an FX51 with the FX core disabled
You also get a 3500 Newcastle
Now can someone explain which is better and which is worse? I have the 3200 Winchester core and apparently that’s one of the crappest
Winchesters are not the oldest unless you are talking about 90nm CPUs only, and it is a great core. SSE3 is not utilized at all, and the mem controller on the Winchester is just as good as on a Venice IMO. The Venice has a slightly better FPU.
It goes something like this:
Sledgehammer (S940, Opteron and FX-51 w/1MB L2, 130nm)
Clawhammer (Original S754, 3200+ w/1MB L2, 130nm)
Newcastle (S754, A64 w/512k L2, 130nm)
Clawhammer (S939, FX-53, some FX-55 w/1MB L2, 130nm)
Newcastle (S939, A64 w/512k L2, 130nm)
Winchester (S939, A64 w/512k L2, 90nm)
San Diego (S939, FX-55, FX-57, 3700+, 4000+ w/1MB L2, 90nm, SSE3)
Venice (S939, A64 w/512k L2, 90nm, SSE3)
Manchester (S939, X2 w/512k L2, 90nm, SSE3, Dual-core)
Toledo (S939, X2 w/1MB L2, 90nm, SSE3, Dual-core)
There were S940 (Sledgehammer) FX-53’s also. 
With A64’s it’s not rocket science. More MHz and L2 is better. If you want to pick 2 CPUs and tell me your usage I can tell you which is better and why.
JUGGY, the wikipedia link on AMD64s might help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon_64.
As for “best”, what do you want to use it for, and are you building from scratch or do you have an existing socket pin format that you need to stick with (754/939/940)?
That Wikipedia has quite a few errors in it but it’s basically correct.
For example, they state that the “early FX’s” had unlocked multis, when the truth is that they all have unlocked multies.
I have a S939 3200 Winchester and was looking at buying a 2nd hand Clawhammer core 3500 for R1300 (130 quid). My mobo is a GA-K8NS-Pro 939.
So, “apparently” the 3500 Clawhammer core is a beast for OC’ing. You can get around 2600mhz stable on air quite easily?
I get 2600mhz (2500mhz with no vcore adjustment, 2600mhz with a pretty hefty boost in vcore, so not worth it to me.) on air with my winchester 3200+, so I dont really see a need for you to upgrade, really. And that was with faulty memory. I get my replacement memory tomorrow, so will see if 2600+ is doable with a lower vcore.
if buying a socket 939 cpu I would go for a AMD Opteron UP 144 San Diego or the 146, susposed to clock really well
Curly
Lots of interest at the mo in the opteron 146 seems to be the in ‘IN’ chip so to speak 
in the overclocking community.
you got one PMM?
Curly
nah I wish
My recent motoring incidents has kind of put a halt on any spending for sometime 
In fact I may have to resort to a sell up before it get all too dated :chuckle:
I can confirm that a couple of 146’s I’ve had do 2800MHz on air, which is a crazy overclock for a 2.0GHz A64. Keep in mind that this is with less than 1.4 volts.
How do I get hold of one of those? We don’t get them in the SA jungle.
unfortunatly Juggy there about as rare as rocking horse **** at the moment, most places seem to sell out as soon as they get stock.
Curly
have a word with Stella at www.cpucity.co.uk Juggy. When I’ve wanted something rare, he always seems to find it 
DT.
There’s a shuttle sporting a 146 using 1.66v that’s getting to the dizzy heights of
3.3Ghz …
Venus core Opterron 146 @ Newegg in stock. Think they will ship international.
OK now I am confused. 
What ti s the difference between and Opteron 175 939 pin dual core and a Althlon 64 4400+ ???
hyper transport links
The ability of the opterons to be multi-processor
I thought the 100 series had all that disabled. hence my question.
Still think they have the 3 hypertransport links
CPU just nobbled against working in tandom with another CPU
but thought the scalability was there still for server based setups that could utilise the
extra hypertransport links
I could be taking rubbish though…
Only difference apart from that is ECC