AMD Sempron: A Fresh Take on Budget Computing
by Derek Wilson on July 28, 2004 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
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
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.
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Pumpkinierre - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Good to see the loss of cache having little effect. From 1Mb to 256K of L2 there would be barely 5% loss in overall performance even in cache biased demos and benchmarks and probably less in real gaming. 256K of L2 is right on the money, all that is needed is the S939 flavor with the dualmemory channel and a lasting socket. The a64 will show its true colours in data streaming activities once software is written or compiled for it rather than P4 biased software. cant wait to see the overclock.Zebo - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Looks like there's going to hardly a difference between a Celeron 335 and Sempron 2800+.---------------
Comparing the top celeron to middle of the road athlon on a old socket A? Comparing a more expensive celeron to a less expensive sempron...
Hardly equitable. Look at the benches comaring competing processors. The 3100+ scores a, to use your words, 'WE PWNED INT3L OMG!!!' victory of 20+ % almost accross the board.;)
ncage - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
the overall value comes in upgradability. You can buy a socket 754 mb + sempron processor and be able to upgrade to an amd 64 chipset without upgrading your mb. So i think its awesomebearxor - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
I don't know...Looks like there's going to hardly a difference between a Celeron 335 and Sempron 2800+.
I don't think anyone could sit in front of either of these processors and tell a real-world difference.
While this looks like a victory for AMD, I think its really slim victory and not much of a 'WE PWNED INT3L OMG!!!' victory.
No doubt the overall cost of the Intel system will be higher, but will it matter for OEM's like Gateway/Compaq, etc?
I imagine we'll see systems using both from most manufacturers but the only downfall I see here is that regardless of which system you choose, you're already outdated with a very minimal upgrade path.
Zebo - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Awesome!