The Athlon II X2 & Phenom II X2: 45nm Dual-Core from AMD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
A Blast from the Past: The Pentium 4 660 and the Pentium Extreme Edition 955
Two weeks ago I asked everyone what older CPUs they’d like to see included in one of our quietly introduced features on AnandTech: Bench. I got requests for everything from original Pentium processors to VIA’s Nano. While I’m working on adding additional data to the tool I just finished testing two older CPUs over the weekend that I thought would be useful in this review: the Pentium 4 660 and the Pentium Extreme Edition 955.
Pentium Extreme Edition 955 (left) and Pentium 4 660 (right)
Both of these CPUs are from 2005. The Pentium 4 660 was a single-core processor based on Intel’s infamous Prescott core. The processor had a 2MB L2 cache and Hyper Threading support; it ran at 3.6GHz, a higher clock speed than any current AMD or Intel processor.
The Pentium EE 955 is based on two separate Intel 65nm Presler cores on one package (ah, remember the early days of dual-core?). The 955 ran at 3.46GHz but had HT enabled, allowing it to execute 4 threads at the same time.
Pentium Extreme Edition 955 (left) and Pentium 4 660 (right)
When the Pentium 660 debuted it cost $605, while the Pentium EE 955 would set you back $999 in 2005. These were some of the fastest Pentium 4s ever released and you’ll see them compared to a couple of ~$90 CPUs here today.
The Test
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) Intel DX48BT2 (Intel X48) MSI DKA790GX Platinum (AMD 790GX) Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H (AMD 790GX) Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-UD5P (AMD 790FX) |
| Chipset: | Intel X48 Intel X58 AMD 790GX AMD 790FX |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1012 (Intel) AMD Catalyst 8.12 |
| Hard Disk: | Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill DDR2-800 2 x 2GB (4-4-4-12) G.Skill DDR2-1066 2 x 2GB (5-5-5-15) Qimonda DDR3-1066 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) Corsair DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Card: | eVGA GeForce GTX 280 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 180.43 (Vista64) NVIDIA ForceWare 178.24 (Vista32) |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit (for SYSMark) Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit |
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haplo602 - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
can you include linux kernel compilation tests, or something similar or larger (gcc, libqt, X) ??? would help me much more than gaming and 3d rendering benches :-)virvan - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
Anand, I BEG you to include some kind of compilation tests in the "bench" application; some of us are actually programmers that spend more time building than watching or transcoding movies ;)A Linux Kernel bench + some kind of MS Visual C++ benchmark would be extremely welcome.
Btw, when could we expect the old CPUs to be added to Bench? I am specifically waiting for Athlon XP and P3/P4's.
10x
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
I really do want to include a software build test, the question is what is the simplest to setup and run, most representative and most repeatable test I can run?I'd prefer something under Windows because it means one less OS/image change (which matters if you're trying to run something on ~70 different configurations) but I'm open to all suggestions.
Thoughts? Feel free to take this conversation offline over email if you'd like to help.
Take care,
Anand
virvan - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
You could try building a CGAL demo program (http://www.cgal.org/FAQ.html)">http://www.cgal.org/FAQ.html). It is cross platform and big enough (but not too big).I am really a Linux programmer but I could try to help if you are not a programmer. I haven't booted Windows for years but, hey, we have virtual machines nowadays :)
adiposity - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
A fairly decent size build that I do is Qt under VS 2008.Instructions are here:
http://wiki.qtcentre.org/index.php?title=Qt4_with_...">http://wiki.qtcentre.org/index.php?title=Qt4_with_...
Download source here:
http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads/windows-cpp">http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads/windows-cpp
You can use VS2008 Express.
-Dan
haplo602 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
I have no experience with VS 2008. Can it be manualy set to certain amount of compile threads ? make has a command line parameter for this, so you can even test a single threaded compile and scale the number of threads used to exploit the drop off limit (where more threads do not yield better performance).qt is quite huge, but that's ok, since a compilation of a few minutes (linux kernel) won't tell much in the future, when processing power increases.
smitty3268 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
Yes, you can add the /MP parameter in Visual Studio.adiposity - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
From the page I linked before:
Add these line to the .pro file for release version:
QMAKE_CXXFLAGS_RELEASE += -MP[processMax]
-Dan
smitty3268 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
All of Qt might be a bit large for a simple benchmark.Something like Paint.NET or NDepend might make a good C# test.
adiposity - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
Use:nmake sub-src
It only compiles qt libraries, not the tools or examples.
It really does not take very long (less than 10 minutes on a Core2Duo 2.4).
-Dan