AMD's Winter Update: Athlon II X3 455, Phenom II X2 565 and Phenom II X6 1100T
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 7, 2010 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Phenom II X6
- Athlon II
- Phenom II
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.
This is the closest we've ever seen the Phenom II X6 to Intel's Core i7 series. Here the 860 is a bit faster but it's also more expensive, the 1100T is a good fit here. The Athlon II X3 455 is 16% faster than its closest competitor, while the Phenom II X2 565 BE falls behind its target. This is very similar to what we reported a couple of months ago, the Athlon II X3 is a great value while the Phenom II X2 makes sense only if you can unlock at least one of its cores.
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.
Single threaded performance is an advantage the i5/i7s have over the Phenom II X6s, however thanks to the high turbo core speed of the 1100T the gap isn't huge. The Athlon II X3 trails the G6950 here as its core advantage is useless in a single threaded application.
Turn up the threads and there's no beating the Phenom II X6 and Athlon II X3, they both do much better than their intended competition.
I've started running Cinebench 11.5 in preparation for an update to Bench, some of the initial results are below:
The Phenom II X6 1100T and Athlon II X3 do very well once again.
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SandmanWN - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
The podiums in peoples basements just keep getting bigger and more nonsensical every day.IMPL0DE - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Bit-tech already admitted having Sandy Bridge in their test labs and Bulldozer is nowhere to be seen at the moment. Next year will be do or die for AMD. Their GPUs are awesome, they need to stiffen up the competition with their CPUs also. It's always the price, and the performace has been lacking for a while now. I'm and AMD user, but if Bulldozer disappoints I'll go with Sandy Bridge for my next build.Finally - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Seems like you are some creative, rendering type of PC user.Sadly/Gladly 90% are not.
Performance has become pretty irrelevant, hasn't it?
You get a 4-core @ 3GHz thrown at you for less than $100.
What of the things your average Joe does with his PC isn't possible with that kind of computer?
E-Mail? Ridiculous.
Surfing? Ridiculous.
Messaging? Ridiculous.
HD-Videos? Oh, come on!
Thanks to shabby console ports and stagnation in the PC Games market, you can easily run about any game with a 2 year old HD4870...
What exactly does Joe need more cores/GHz/performance for?
tim851 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
E-Mail/Surfing/Messaging/HD-Videos...You could do any of that with any of the first Athlon X2s, released in the Summer of '05.
If this is your mindset, what are you doing here? Isn't it pointless to follow CPU news for five years?
Finally - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
The argument is as follows:The hi-end/hi-performance market segmet is negligible.
If e.g. Apple really adopts AMD hardware for their fancy iSomething builds, they will be on the rise again.
nitrousoxide - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Die for AMD? In fact 2011 is a year for AMD to catch up much they have lost since 2007.Just look at what Intel will be doing:
1.ship the same crappy Atom and the revised 32-nm version won't come before Q4 2011--Ok, at ultraportable/netbook, Intel is doomed to fail in the face of mighty Brazos. It will retain some market at lower-TDP such as tablets but that's the world for Tegra 2.
2.launch the SNB, an architecural upgrade from Westmere, which suggest that you can't expect much performance boost from current dual-core Pentium and i3 parts. That means Intel's still got weak low-end products. Keep in mind that the dual-core SNBs will compete with Llano APUs with 4 revised K10 cores+HD5500 level IGP. The Athlon X4s can already dominate i3s, so we can't say i3 2000 series will do better job than Llano.
3. The high-end is always Intel's world. But this time life will be hard for SNB quad-cores and Westmere hex-cores. Bulldozer is the first new architecture since K8 (K10 is only an enhanced K8), it has eight cores running at crazy frequency as high as 4GHz. So I'm very certain that it can at least overrun the quad-core SNBs and have similar if not better performance with hex-core Westmeres. Well, there's an eight-core SNB-E, but it's not what AMD is concerned with. For AMD, returning to $300 market, controlled by today's i7 9 Series, is the biggest victory, the $1000 market is meaningless because you can't sell many chips on such outrageous price slot.
So things are not so bad for AMD in the next year as long as they ship their product on time and keep up the pace on Fusion Project.
anubis44 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
I don't think anybody is going to be disappointed by Bulldozer. Whereas Sandybridge is an incremental improvement, Bulldozer is a complete redesign. It's a totally new design compared to the K7/K8/Phenom I/Phenom II architecture. Basically, it's the first radically different design to come out of AMD since the launch of the Athlon in 1999, so that should tell you something. We're not going to be seeing modest, single percentage performance increase, it'll likely be on the order of 30-60% depending on what you're doing.Finally - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Phenom I was a redesign as well.I still have a bad aftertaste in my mouth when I think about it.
It took them until Phenom II to iron things out.
mino - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
"... Just two months ago AMD gave us the Athlon II X3 450 and the Phenom II X2 56[0], today we're..."Should be:
... Just two months ago AMD gave us the Athlon II X3 450 and the Phenom II X2 56[0], today we're...
Cheers.
mino - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
:D typo included also by me :)The original article has: "... Just two months ago AMD gave us the Athlon II X3 450 and the Phenom II X2 56[5], today we're..."