Pricing, Roadmap and Model Information

This is where things get interesting in the budget market. We'll start off with the AMD to Intel comparison, and then we'll move on to the interesting part.

From our RealTime Pricing engine, Celeron's show up at NewEgg for the following prices:

Intel Celeron D 335: $127
Intel Celeron D 330: $97
Intel Celeron D 325: $88

As the Sempron isn't on the market yet, we have to go on pricing from AMD in orders of 1000 units. The line-up on these processors is as follows:

AMD Sempron 3100+: $120
AMD Sempron 2800+: $103
AMD Sempron 2600+: $79
AMD Sempron 2500+: $69
AMD Sempron 2400+: $52
AMD Sempron 2300+: $45
AMD Sempron 2200+: $39

So, what we have here is just about price parity among the top two budget processors from AMD and Intel. Again, we don't have any "real" retail numbers on Sempron yet, but these should be very close to prices at which these processors hit the street.

Because of the clock speeds of the K7 Sempron processors, we expect to see the Sempron 2800+ perform on par with an Athlon XP 2600+, which would put it above the new Celeron processors in most cases. And we'll revisit price/performance after we take a look at the performance tests.

The most interesting thing to note with respect to pricing is that the 166MHz FSB Tbred Athlon XP 2600+ can easily be found for between $70 and $80. That means that AMD's new budget line (except for the 3100+) loses out in price/performance to the mainstream chip on which it is based.

On the flip side, if overclocked and rebranded processors were a problem for AMD before (from the justification for their multiplier lock), how much more of a problem will it be for them to have aging cheap Tbred AXPs underclocked, rebranded as Semprons, and sold for more money? Granted, there aren't that many of those processors on the market right now, but it is some food for thought.

Here's a quick summary of Sempron's common features.
  • 130nm manufacturing process
  • 256KB L2 cache size
  • 128KB L1 cache size
The K8 Sempron has the normal advantages that an Athlon 64 would have (except for the x86-64 part). Sempron for Socket 754 has an on-die memory controller, and runs memory at DDR400 speeds, which greatly enhances memory intensive performance over its K7 cousin. Thus, the K8 part with a 200MHz lower clock speed is rated 300 performance rating points higher than the K7 part - not that we put much stock in the performance of these budget chips.

We've complained about the model number rating system every chance we have thus far, but to be fair, AMD has a lot of ground to make up against Intel, and they need every advantage they can get. The fact that the new aggressive model numbers step on the toes of existing AMD products is kind of a side effect. Here's why:

The new performance rating system is independent of any previous rating system and based solely on relative performance among other Sempron processors in a suite of benchmark suites. Specifically, AMD uses:

PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004
PC Magazine Content Creatoin Winstone 2004
SYSmark 2004 Office Productivity Overall
SYSmark 2004 Internet Content Creation Overall

We test part of this suite in our budget benchmarks, but we really don't have our hands on enough of the Sempron line to tell how their relative performance numbers actually indicate relative performance.

The reason why AMD focused on these suites when rating their Sempron line is that games and high performance software aren't the typical target market for budget processors. While this is perfectly acceptable, and an isolated relative scale is also acceptable, "arbitrarily" picking a single fixed point around which to scale performance numbers has led to more aggressive ratings.

Of course, if a consumer or a company is looking at building a lot of budget systems, they are going to look at equivalent price points and equivalent "performance" (by that, I mean megahertz or performance rating). The problem is that whether or not AMD wants to do things "right", they still have to sell product to the consumer. With a Sempron 2800+ cheaper than an Intel Celeron 335 (2.8GHz), people who don't understand that numbers don't mean quality will pick the cheaper part (unless they are brainwashed by the Intel brand name). People who know what's going on will understand that the Sempron 2800+ is higher performing than the Celeron 335 and will buy it if it reflects the level of performance that they desire at that price point.

The final aspect of these chips we would like to mention is power dissipation. All of the new Sempron line are designed to maximally dissipate 62W of power. This is on par with AMDs other CPUs, and we are also hearing that we might should expect mobile versions of the Sempron to be rated at less than half the wattage of their desktop counter parts. We don't know when this line of processors will be launced at this time.

Two Flavors are Better than One: Socket 754 The Test
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  • abrogard - Tuesday, March 29, 2005 - link


    I think there's something should sweep through the internet: Clearly labelling the country of origin of your site! It's not clear which country we are in, often, and therefore what money we're talking.
    Followed by clearly dating the page.
    abrogard@yahoo.com
    :)
  • cleanjew - Friday, January 14, 2005 - link

    Hi, can someone tell me if it would be a good idea to buy a computer running an amd sepron 3000+, i would be using it to run mid range games, and i would like to use internet and productivity software at a fast speed. Do you also think it would be faster than a celeron and comparable to a p4?

    Thanks

    If you want you could email me at jewish-mexican@charter.net
  • trexpesto - Saturday, August 21, 2004 - link

    I just got a Shuttle AN35N and retail TBred 2700+ for ~119 incl. shipping and tax, on sale at outpost.
  • Sparrow - Friday, July 30, 2004 - link

    But in the test he say's that the extra 83 MHz make the difference !!!
    Jens
  • coldpower27 - Friday, July 30, 2004 - link

    I am guessing Anandtech was using the Barton based 2600+, you know the one with 1.92GHZ/333FSB.
  • Sparrow - Friday, July 30, 2004 - link

    ???? If a Sempron 2800+ is a Thoroughbred (166*12) and the xp 2600+ is a Thoroughbred (166*12.5) why can the Sempron be faster in some test's ? an error or are there some changes in memory speed ????? !!!!!!
    Jens
  • MAME - Friday, July 30, 2004 - link

    awesome AMD, just awesome

    this chip is very nice
  • coldpower27 - Friday, July 30, 2004 - link

    Hey Trogdor, notice I can post here now too:)

    Anyway, just to sum up I would like to see these processor as well.

    Athlon XP-M Barton @ 2.3,2.4,2.5 using 200x11.5, 200x12, 200x12.5

    Celeron Northwood-128
    2.4,2.5,2.6,2.7,2.8

    Celeron Prescott-256
    2.4,2.53,2.66,2.8

    Duron Applebred
    1.4,1.8

    Pentium 4 Northwood, Prescott
    2.8 with FSB800
  • Zebo - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link

    oh LOL:)
  • TrogdorJW - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link

    Woah, KF... that was a whole lot of stuff to post, quite a bit of it rather unrelated. You must have even more free time than me! ;)

    Zebo, you apparently missed the point completely: "The overlapping Athlon FX, Athlon 64, and now Sempron names is going to really cause confusion among the *less-informed* public." The less-informed public doesn't include anyone reading hardware sites or OC forums. Yeah, Sempron is the value system meant to compete with Celeron, but both AMD and Intel are happy to sell lots of slower, "crippled" chips to the uninformed buyers. The 2.8 GHz Celeron chips were absolutely terrible performers - about as fast as a P4 1.8 or 2.0 - but Intel was more than happy to dupe people into purchasing those with their high clockspeed. The Celeron D is better, but the tactic remains the same. AMD is now joining them, calling lesser processors "3100+" and "2800+" and leaving it to the salespeople.

    You don't think there are going to be plenty of salespeople pushing these systems with claims like "the Sempron 2800+ is basically just as fast as a 2.8 GHz chip, and the only difference between it and the Athlon 64 2800+ is the lack of 64-bit support, which really isn't needed anyway"? In sales, it's a lot more important to get a sale than to get a big sale. They'll shoot for the big sales if possible, but when someone wants a cheap system, they'll talk up the Sempron (and/or Celeron) as though it's just as good as a more expensive Athlon64/Pentium4.

    That's what I meant when I said it's creating confusion, and that the confusion is likely to be an intended consequence. Car manufacturers do the same thing: you don't want an informed purchaser coming in to buy a car! You want the salesman to have the advantage, so that they can get the buyer into *any* Ford, Chevy, Honda, etc. and keep them from going to a different store.

    Most PC shos (and car dealerships) make a set amount of money off of a sale, because the hard drives, case, monitor, RAM, etc. all have markups. So if someone buys a computer, the shop makes at least $100. $100 on a $500 computer is a good return. If they buy a $1000 computer, they might make $150 to $200. Granted, on the "luxury" computer systems that cost over $2000, they'll make a killing, but those are hardly ever sold.

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