AMD's Fall Refresh: New Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs Balance Price and Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 21, 2010 2:52 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Phenom II X6
- Athlon II
x264 HD Video Encoding Performance
Graysky's x264 HD test uses x264 to encode 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.
Video encoding performance is a definite strength of the Phenom II X6. You get comparable performance to the more expensive Core i7 860. And without Hyper Threading, the Core i5s are unable to distance themselves from the Phenom II X4 970.
Again the Athlon II X4 645 and X3 450 dominate their respective competitors.
PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
The direct comparisons we've been pointing out this entire match continue to hold as we look at different applications. The Phenom II X6 1075T performs as it should, while the Phenom II X4 970 falls short of the i5 750. The triple and quad-core Athlon IIs couldn't be better.
7-Zip Benchmark Performance
Included in 7-zip is a pure algorithm test that completely removes IO from the equation. This test scales with core count and as a result we get a good theoretical picture of how these chips perform. Note that the actual 7-zip compression/decompression process is limited to 2 threads so there's no real world advantage to having more cores.
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Guspaz - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
A few price to performance graphs would be nice. You know, "sysmarks per dollar", or that sort of thing. It would help identify the sweet spot in processor reviews.Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I've been thinking about doing it for a while, it looks like there's overwhelming desire for it so I'll begin working on the best way to put it together :)Take care,
Anand
Taft12 - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I'm not sure "Sysmarks/$" is all that more useful than a general recommendation that the results reveal quite clearly. In this article for example, the Athlon X3 is a stellar value while the Athlon X4 and i5 quad cores are also very good.However, this has been common knowledge for over a year now, so are we really getting anything we didn't already know from a "Sysmarks/$"-type of graph?
RyuDeshi - Monday, September 27, 2010 - link
I haven't been in the market for a new processor/chipset for over a year now, so price/performance is something that would be very helpful for me right now with all these newer chips since Core2 and Phenom I. So I concur with the OP, I would love to see some price references in or near some graphs.marraco - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
No, please. Do not do bar charts. Do X-Y price-performance charts. They are far more useful.vol7ron - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I'm kind of partial to the smallnetbuilder's price-performance chart: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=co...You can hover to see the item.
evilspoons - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
Seconded. X-Y performance charts are the way to go!!evilspoons - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
Err, price-performance.Brucmack - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link
If you do that, please integrate the differences in power consumption somehow. It would be silly to save $20 by buying an AMD processor if it costs $50 more to run over its lifetime.strikeback03 - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link
How long would that lifetime be? 1 year? 4 years? Is the machine on all the time but idling 22 hrs a day? Is it gamed on 10 hrs a day but off the rest?