AMD's Athlon II X3 435 & New Energy Efficient CPUs: Killing Intel Below $90
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 20, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:
Compared to the Intel dual-core options, the Athlon II X3 435 is a definite winner here. It's got the core count and clock speed to beat the old Penryn derivatives. Its biggest competition comes from its own family, the Athlon II X4 620 is the better buy here.
Cinebench R10
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
As I've been mentioning this entire time, the Athlon II X3 435 doesn't really sacrifice clock speed in its three-core configuration. At 2.9GHz even its single threaded performance is comparable to the Pentium E6300. Run a multithreaded app however and the performance goes from parity to leading:
POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
The POV-Ray results echo what we've been seeing thus far, vs. Intel there's no contest - the 435 is the better value. Compared to the quad-core Athlon IIs however, the 435 isn't very good.
Blender 2.48a
Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.
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ecvs85 - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
maddoctor in real life must be a women who just dumped by her boyfriend that works in AMD's CPU development team :)maddoctor - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
Intel products are cheaper. Price/performance ration is more favourable to Intel products. Only AMDiot will like AMD products.SunSamurai - Sunday, November 1, 2009 - link
Without AMD, intel would not have cheap processors. DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THAT IDIOT?StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
[quote]Intel products are cheaper. Price/performance ration is more favourable to Intel products. Only AMDiot will like AMD products.[/quote]Both company's are good, and both have good price/performance depending on the targeted market demographic.
Lunyone - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
I like that AMD is bringing out a x3 based off of the Athlon II's. This makes sense, so they can sell more chips/wafer. I think for the $12 difference I'd rather have the x4 620, but that is just me. I do like that they have come out with more power friendly CPU's too, especially for those thinking of a quieter HTPC!! I know that the Intel CPU's generally OC better, but most people don't OC at all so having a cheaper/better based clocked CPU is a win/win for consumers. Maybe we'll see a price drop during the Christmas rush, maybe not.sinshixxi - Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - link
yea $12 diff com'on, who gonna save it for x3. Maybe lower grade x3 the $76 would have an edge comparing to $99 x4. $22 I wouldn't save it. $99 x4 just simply kick ass.Sledge hammer - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
this triple core outperforms the intel E8400 and E8500 that cost 100 dollars more.http://www.guru3d.com/article/athlon-ii-x3-435-pro...">http://www.guru3d.com/article/athlon-ii-x3-435-pro...
coldpower27 - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
That is Intel's Premium Dual Core line, it's no longer the best price/performance ratio in relation to Intel's own products.there are cheaper alternatives...
You can get pretty much the same performance with the E7600 and a little bit less with the E7500 vs the E8000's. So the difference is reduced to around 50 USD.
The thing is those processors are barely 82mm2 and cost 130-150USD vs the 169mm2 90USD processor, Intel's margin is simply way higher.
Intel doesn't really compete in the Tri-Core space really. It'a niche AMD gets to enjoy because Intel has no interest in competing there for now.
- Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
I think most folk can’t see the potential paradigm shift of the direction AMD is moving, all the while remaining consistent to their eccobeliefs- "less power more production". Their Opteron multicore processor stresses low power with multiple cores- I think it’s clear looking at the Opteron and their other recent chips that AMD is not competing with Intel for the top speed honors or the fastest Giga chip. We have also seen perhaps closer relationships between AMD Apple, AMD Microsoft directly connected by AMDs graphic card products 4000 series, OpenCL, directX11, direct Compute... The giga-chip wars are over, AMD has been preparing for the end-of-day future is now, for a while now. It’s no longer about pumping the power of the CPU, because all the processing power one ever needs goes unused; we've all had this river of untapped processing power in our computers for some time now. The power is in the GPU; coupled with current low watt multicore processors, while using OpenCl, DirectX11, direct-compute, CPU-GPU becomes both the redeemer and the grim reaper at the same time. The second stage is the bonding between GPU & CPU- LlanoOn another note- I personally don’t believe Larrabee will be developed in time, if at all work as promised. I belive they were late in seeing
- Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
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