AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 (Socket 939) Processor Review

Super PI

Developed by some folks from the University of Tokyo (yes, Japan), Super PI is a small utility that does just as the name implies. It figures PI to a set number of decimal places. Since PI is an infinite number to the right of the decimal point, the utility measures the time it takes to figure a set number of places. It runs the calculations a set number of times and gives a time for the completion of the task. This is a simple and effective way to measure the raw number crunching power of the processor being used to compile the results.

This test doesn't really simulate anything you'll likely do with it, but it is a decent test to show how well a processor can crunch numbers. During this test I had the machines compute PI to 8 million decimal places and repeat the operation 22 times. The end result is the time it took for each processor to complete the task.

The Athlon FX was able to knock a minute and 13 seconds off the time of the Athlon XP box, showing a 17% increase in performance. So far we've been seeing some significant increases when using the Athlon 64 based processor.