AMD's New Year Refresh: Athlon II X4 635, Phenom II X2 555, Athlon II X2 255 & Athlon II X3 440
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 25, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3dsmax Performance
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:
The trend continues under 3dsmax. If you're running a highly threaded workload, there's no better value than the Athlon II X4 635 (although the Core i3 530 does come close). For the price of a dual-core CPU, the Athlon II X3 440 does the same thing.
With the Phenom II X2 555 BE performing similarly to the Pentium E6300, it'll be slower than the equivalently priced E6600. Surprisingly enough, AMD's new dual-core options aren't really that interesting in multithreaded workloads.
Cinebench R10 Performance
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.
And this is where the tradeoff becomes apparent The Athlon II X4 and X3 have the single threaded performance of a value dual-core Intel CPU. Crank up the thread count and the X3 and X4 do very well, but on more normal tasks they sub-optimal. These chips are for those who know exactly what they want.
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blowfish - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
And today you're getting 4 cores at 3.4 GHz for 140 / 125W. They'll be lucky and need heavy speed binning to get 3 GHz at 140W for the best 6-core CPU.Well that depends on the process - it might well be feasible at 32NM.
MrSpadge - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
But these CPUs aren't going to be 32 nm. I'd even bet a beer on that.blowfish - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
yes, you're right. I sniffed around a bit online and it seems like they're going to use 45NM, so it's hard to see anything much more than 3GHZ, and even then only on a very mature 45NM process. The die size is also huge - bigger than the Intel 975 EE, so prices will also be well above mainstream.blowfish - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Anand, since anyone doing x264 encoding is interested in the total time required, rather than the times for the first and second passes themselves, don't you think it would make sense to simply combine the two charts into one overall one?The AMD's seem to do well on the first pass, but less well on the second, and whilst that might be of some interest, it's the overall that's actually of any use in determining the ranking order of different cpu's for anyone building an encoding pc.
As ever, love the reviews though!
dgingeri - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Which would be better for a home/ small business server with a base Linux OS and virtualized Windows file server, Linux web and SQL servers?The Athlon II X4 555 or the Core i5 530? I have the drives, power supply, and case, but I'd need to get a MB, Processor, and 8GB memory.
ChristopherRice - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
You would find either of these would do a fine job of that. Really you can throw together an old p4 to do that type of work. All you need to ensure is that you have the ram to support your applications.dgingeri - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Not for the things I would be looking to do with it: SQL server and web server as virtuals for web based POS/ Accounting/ inventory system, or a Virtual machine based streaming web server for music and movies around the house or on mobile devices that would use wireless networking to connect and update.Imagine: turning on your tv, pulling up your home Hulu type app, and bringing up the movie or tv show you want to watch.
or
Imagine: a small store, using thin clients as cash registers and e-mail, iPhones as inventory and ordering modules, centralized printing with nightly backup and RAID 1 mirroring.
Taft12 - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
Well why didn't you just say so in the first place?!dgingeri - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
oops, I meant the Athlon II X4 635, not 555 (getting these stupid numbers mixed up. Why not go with regular clock rate and core count?)Pastuch - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
A huge number of us own a Core2Duo E8xxx series CPU. Can you please post the benchmarks of one of them in this review to give us an idea of how it compares to an overclocked I3 530 or Phenom 2 555? Thanks.