The Athlon II X2 & Phenom II X2: 45nm Dual-Core from AMD

Home CPUs

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/2/2009 12:00:00 AM
Posted in CPUs

Power Consumption

Both the Athlon II X2 and Phenom II X2 are light on the power consumption. Our Athlon II X2 sample actually drew more power under load, possibly because of its larger L2 caches which operate at full clock speed rather than at the 2.0GHz un-core clock of the Phenom II's 6MB L3. Alternatively, it could just be poor BIOS power management support for the Athlon II at this stage.

Idle Power Consumption

Load Power Consumption - x264 HD Bench Pass 1

Gaming Perfo Overclocking

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1meg L2 difference doesn't seem that great? by 7Enigma on Thursday, June 04, 2009

Hello Anand,

In the article you seem to imply a tremendous difference in that 2meg to 3meg jump but your single data point doesn't show that conclusion.

In your example there is a ~9% increase in performance when going from 2 to 3 megs, but there is also a 4.5% increase in clockspeed between the 2 chips. So at best (in this example) you have a 5% difference, which while significant, I would't say it was tremendous.

Can you comment on whether you did any further tests with identical frequencies?

7Enigma

Some corrections by FlameDeer on Thursday, June 04, 2009

Here are some corrections of AnandTech Bench.

Refer to here:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?b=25&a...">Adobe Photoshop CS4 results of few CPUs from AnandTech Bench

1. AMD Athlon II X2 250 results missing a dot, becoming slower than Intel Atom 230.

2. Better using "Intel Pentium Dual Core E5300" for E5300 as the name Intel printed on the CPU.

3. AMD Athlon LE-1620 notes (platform side notes) should be same as AMD Athlon LE-1640.

Thanks for adding more CPUs for comparison in AnandTech Bench, doing the full test in latest software is really time consuming especially for old CPUs. Take care.

FlameDeer

no phenom comparisons? by MadAd on Wednesday, June 03, 2009

would have liked to see phenom (non II) compared, especially the low end x3s, users may be thinking of upgrading from those about now

MadAd

RE: no phenom comparisons? by FlameDeer on Thursday, June 04, 2009

You can always conveniently & interactively comparing them here.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/">AnandTech Bench

FlameDeer

Cool n Quiet by Elementalism on Wednesday, June 03, 2009

I never had much luck running Cool n Quiet when I used to run AMD processors. Even in games the CPU was put into a low clock mode running at half speed. Sounds like a buggy implementation to this day.

And I cant say in my experience it was the Mother Boards fault either. I enabled Cool and Quiet in the bios and nothing happened. It wasnt until I installed the Cool n Quiet driver all hell broke loose.

Elementalism

Yes, buggy. by mino on Wednesday, June 03, 2009

However one has to keep in mind the bug comes from Redmond.
The Win 5.x scheduler is a piece of garbage and it allways was. It is just that it shows with different symptoms:
1 CPU core => crappy multi-tasking on heavy loads
2+ CPU cores => unable to get a grasp that power management not a thing of the future ...

A no, being from 2000 is no excuse, proper OS scheduler were there 30yrs ago.
Had MS decided to do so, their Win 5.x schedules would be a proper one from the start.

As for AMD, it is a price one pays for being ahead of the market.

Remember, it took Intel 5yrs (2003-2008) to get comparable power management capabilities as AMD with Nehalem.

mino

RE: Yes, buggy. by mino on Wednesday, June 03, 2009

sorry for the spelling mess..

mino

yay by Hrel on Wednesday, June 03, 2009

YAY 3D max, also that E7500 is beating the crap out of everything but AMD's top of the line. That really solitifies in my mind that picking the E8400 6 months ago for my friends gaming computer was the right choice. Stupid AMD, I REALLY want them to be competitive again so Intel is FORCED to stop overcharging for EVERYTHING.

Hrel

Uncore Overclock by mmpalmeira on Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Did you try to overclock the uncore of the AMD's CPUs?

mmpalmeira

Still calling it the CnQ bug huh? by calyth on Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Just like that article that you linked to with the name CnQ bug, I don't believe that a hardware manufacturer creates a bug if the OS scheduler can't seem to do the sensible thing and not bounce threads around. Although various factors in the AMD chips make the problem worse, bouncing threads across different cores on an Intel chip also has a bit of impact, since L1 and the L2 shouldn't be shared across cores on the i7 platform.

So please, stop calling it a bug. The bug lies in Windows, not the chips.

calyth

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