When AMD64 was originally launched, it was launched in two forms, Athlon 64 on the Socket 754 platform and Athlon FX and Opteron on the Socket 940 platform. The Athlon 64 is essentially the Athlon FXs smaller brother, with less cache and support for only single channel memory rather than dual. Both chips of course have 64-Bit extensions and the memory controller integrated into the CPUs die.

With the launch of Socket 939, we see both the Athlon 64 and FX migrate to the same platform, leaving Socket 754 behind to gather dust. Now we can see why some motherboard manufacturers were reluctant to produce boards for these platforms.

On the 17th of August, AMD launch the Sempron range of chips. The low end Semprons have been created with similar intentions as that of the AMD Duron. They will be released not only for Socket A, but for Socket 754. The Socket A chips are rebadged Thoroughbred cores, so won't be the best overclockers, but considering a 2200+ will be around £15, any overclocking will be quite a bonus.

The best value for money, will be the Semprons designed for Socket 754, which will be based on the Newcastle core with a reduced cache of 256Kb and no 64-Bit support. These should overclock very nicely indeed, with speeds of 2.6GHz not being uncommon. The reduced cache obviously produces less heat and yields should also be higher.

Since Socket 754 is set to be the next platform for good value, overclockable, mid-range systems, we thought now is a good time to take a look platforms available for these chips. To do this, we have decided to this in two parts, this first article will be looking at performance differences across the available chipset and will shortly be followed up by a round up of 10 currently available motherboards.

Firstly, let's see how an Athlon 64 chipset differs from the older Athlon XP architecture. These block diagrams illustrate the differences.

Athlon XP Solution

As you can see, with a 32-Bit system the north bridge acts as a central hub between all the most important components. This means the north bridge is very important to the overall system performance.

Athlon 64 Solution

This diagram shows the Athlon 64 architecture. The memory interface is completely independent of the north bridge and the front side bus is replaced by the HyperTransport (HT) bus. Because of this, the north bridge plays a less important part in overall system performance.

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