Memory performance
These synthetic tests don't always mirror real-world performance, but they can tell us some interesting things about the CPUs and their memory subsystems, so we'll start here.

The Extreme Edition 955's combination of 800MHz DDR2 memory and a 1066MHz front-side bus gives it an edge in raw memory bandwidth. The FX-60's RAM runs at half that clock speed, but it's still fast enough to stay in the same neighborhood.

Our simple Linpack test isn't optimized anywhere near well enough as some versions that serve as excellent scientific computing benchmarks. It can, however, show us the basic shape and bandwidth of the L1 and L2 caches in these CPU cores. The FX-60 delivers performance right between the 2.4GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and the 2.8GHz FX-57. However, the Presler gives us something of a surprise; at 3.46GHz, its L2 cache proves faster than that of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz. We've seen this sort of thing before, like when the Athlon 64 3500 moved from 130nm to 90nm and the cache got faster. The likely explanation is that Intel made the cache faster, clock for clock, on Cedar Mill than on its 90nm chips.

The Athlon 64 processors have had a leg up in memory access latency ever since AMD brought a memory controller onboard the CPU. That advantage remains here, despite the Extreme Edition 955's 1066MHz bus and fast DDR2 memory.