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
SYSMark 2007 Performance
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.
Given its age, SYSMark is more of a lightly threaded benchmark by today's standards. Dual core processors (or quad-core chips with aggressive turbo modes) do quite well here. AMD's Phenom II X2 555 BE does better than anything else in its price range. The Core 2 Duo E7500 is probably a good indicator of the Pentium E6600's performance, and it just equals the perf of the 555 BE.
The triple and quad-core chips don't do that well here, there just aren't enough threads to go around.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
If you have threads and need cores, AMD has the medicine. The $119 Athlon II X4 635 handles our Photoshop test with the same elegance as Intel's Core i3 530. The Phenom II X2 555 BE and the Athlon II X2 255 are on par with the Pentium E6300 and should both be a bit slower than the E6600.
x264 HD Video Encoding Performance
Graysky's x264 HD test uses the publicly available x264 encoder to convert a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.
For video-encoding you can't beat the value of the Athlon II X4 635. You get the performance of a quad-core Intel that will set you back another $40. The triple-core Athlon II X3 440 does well here, besting all previous generation dual-core CPUs. Only the Core i3 530 is faster, and more expensive. The Phenom II X2 555 BE and the Athlon II X2 255 perform similarly to their equivalently priced Intel CPUs.
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Nfarce - 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."Actually you can take their data on the E7500 here and extrapolate the information from that vs. where an E8600 (or whatever) is in other similar tests and then plug it back in here.
At least, that's what I do. It doesn't take much time and usually there's a reason why AT will leave a certain chipset out (not sure why they chose the E7500 here over an E8500 however).
Taft12 - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - link
not sure why they chose the E7500 here over an E8500 howeverBecause the E8000 series is in a different pricing universe compared to the CPUs discussed here. They should not under any circumstances be considered by any buyer in today's market.
But indeed you can use the E7500 as a good baseline. The clockspeed is nearly the same so the performance will be marginally better than the E7500 based on larger cache and faster FSB, but not by a whole lot.
Tamdrik - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Wow, is the newer X58 platform that much more energy efficient than the X48? I was shocked to see the Core i3 system at load consuming less power than the Pentium E6300 at idle, especially considering the latter is a 65W TDP part, which is less than the i3 at 73W. I think the GT280 by itself idles at around 50W, so the rest of an X58 system idles at under 40W (presumably including ~10W or so of PSU losses) vs. twice that for an X48? That's crazy.IntelUser2000 - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Anand seems to have completely forgot that X58 chipsets only run LGA1366 CPUs. The test page should show either a P55 or H55.The TDP of the Clarkdale's are with iGPU, so it'll fare better comparatively against Core 2 with discrete GPUs.
ET - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
The Athlon II X2 255 beats the Phenom II X2 555 BE in Far Cry 2, and it's slower and has less cache. So what's its secret?BTW, it looks from these benchmarks that the slowest CPU works well for these games. I wonder if there's a larger difference in the minimum frame rate.
nubie - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Latency.The Phenom X2 is a cut-down X4 with level 3 cache.
The Athlon II X2 is a designed Dual-Core with no level 3 cache (and LARGER level 2 caches per core.)
Anandtech did a review on the Athlon II X2:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
I for one had been waiting about 5 years for them to come out with this chip. And it is about time. The 65nm process never got 1MB level 2 Cache per core, we had to stick with 90nm and wait for these 45nm chips.
GeorgeH - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Actually, "ET" is right - something very weird is going on.Compare:
Athlon II X2 250 @ 3.0GHz - 36FPS
Athlon II X2 255 @ 3.1GHz - 45.8FPS
That's got to be the most magical 3% clockspeed bump in the history of the PC.
Taft12 - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - link
I am not seeing what you are talking about. I see 45.8FPS for the X2 255, but there is no 36FPS except for the quad-core. I don't see Athlon II X2 250 on any of these graphs...Anyway, I agree with nubie that the Athlon II X2 is the real gem in AMD's current lineup with the jacked-up clockspeeds and huge L2 cache per core. These allow for fantastic systems at unbelievable prices!
GeorgeH - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - link
The benchmarks were taken from Bench (Anandtech’s CPU benchmark repository). Just so what’s going on is a bit clearer:Phenom II X2 550 BE @ 3.1GHz – 41FPS
Phenom II X2 555 BE @ 3.2GHz – 43.6FPS
100MHz gets you 2.6FPS or 6%
Athlon II X4 630 @ 2.8GHz – 40FPS
Athlon II X4 635 @ 2.9GHz – 40.2FPS
100MHz gets you 0.2FPS or 0.5%
Athlon II X3 435 @ 2.9GHz – 40FPS
Athlon II X3 440 @ 3.0GHz – 42.8FPS
100MHz gets you 2.8FPS or 7%.
Athlon II X2 250 @ 3.0GHz – 36FPS
Athlon II X2 255 @ 3.1GHz – 45.8FPS
100MHz gets you 9.8FPS or 27%.
To quote Firefly’s Jubal Early – “Does that seem right to you?”
StormyParis - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
I conclude that I still wouldn't use 4 cores for anything...