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AMD's dual core Opteron & Athlon 64 X2 - Server/Desktop Performance Preview

 by Anand Lal Shimpi, Jason Clark & Ross Whitehead on April 21, 2005 9:25 AM EST
144 Comments | Add A Comment
144 Comments

Business/General Use Performance

Business Winstone 2004

Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:
  • Microsoft Access 2002
  • Microsoft Excel 2002
  • Microsoft FrontPage 2002
  • Microsoft Outlook 2002
  • Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
  • Microsoft Project 2002
  • Microsoft Word 2002
  • Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
  • WinZip 8.1

Business Winstone 2004

Business Winstone is a good example of a collection of single threaded applications used in a relatively light multitasking manner; the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ does better than Intel's fastest dual core CPUs, but it is still slower than the fastest single core AMD chips.

Office Productivity SYSMark 2004

SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:
"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."

Communication SYSMark 2004

Right off the bat, we see that the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ is reasonably competitive. Here, it is within striking distance of the FX-55, but all of the contenders are fairly close in performance.

The next test is Document Creation performance, which shows very little difference in drive performance between the contenders:
"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."

Document Creation SYSMark 2004

With a score of 224, we have a new record for performance. Remember that the Athlon 64 has never been able to execute more than one thread at a time. So, the performance benefit that AMD will see from dual core can be larger than what Intel has seen simply because Intel has had Hyper Threading on all of their desktop Pentium 4 CPUs for quite some time now. This is one such example where AMD gets a pretty big benefit from dual core, with the 4400+ outpacing the FX-55.

The final test in our Office Productivity suite is Data Analysis, which BAPCo describes as:
"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."

Data Analysis SYSMark 2004

The 4400+ offers the best performance that AMD can, but this test clearly favors Intel's Pentium 4/D architectures more.

Microsoft Office XP SP-2

Here, we see in that the purest of office application tests, performance doesn't vary all too much.

Microsoft Office XP with SP-2


Mozilla 1.4

Quite possibly the most frequently used application on any desktop is the one that we pay the least amount of attention to when it comes to performance. While a bit older than the core that is now used in Firefox, performance in Mozilla is worth looking at as many users are switching from IE to a much more capable browser on the PC - Firefox.

Mozilla 1.4


ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0

ACDSee is a popular image editing tool that is great for basic image editing options such as batch resizing, rotating, cropping and other such features that are too elementary to justify purchasing something as powerful as Photoshop for. There are no extremely complex filters here, just pure batch image processing.

ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0

Once again, we find the X2 4400+ in between the two high end Athlon 64s and the two dual core Intel chips.

Dual Core Desktop Performance: AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Multitasking Content Creation
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  • patrick0 - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link

    If they would have the dual-core in stores in June, I would buy one, but this isn't the case, so I'll buy San-Diego 4000+.
    I'll upgrade when quad-core will be out.

  • Barneyk - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link

    oh, you cant edit your comments...

    Anyway, im really excited about this development of computing, not having good multitasking ability feels so outdated, i've been crying about that for years, and fianlly its here...
    Well, almost, and its probably another year before i can afford it, but still... :)

  • Barneyk - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link

    test

  • jvarszegi - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link

    Again, the lack of technical superiority of AT's "experts" is obvious. On SQL Server, you're not supposed to prepend stored-procedure names with "sp_", as it introduces a performance penalty. This is basic knowledge. Some have remarked before on how their .NET "experts" code like, um, transplanted ColdFusion "experts". :)

  • Visual - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link

    a minor error: on page 12 right above the graph it says "The Dual Opteron 252's lead by 19% over the closest Xeon, which was the Quad Xeon 3.6 GHz 667MHz FSB" but the slowest xeon is the 3.3 GHz one.

  • mechBgon - Saturday, April 23, 2005 - link

    Zebo... hehe, yep :D

  • justly - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link

    An outstanding article about AMDs duel core, just what I would expect from Anandtech (to bad I had to go to techreport.com to read it).

  • Zebo - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link

    Hahaha makes Chetta's drool: Looks just like you MECH.:)

  • MACKTEK - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link

    I appreciate the article but am disappointed by the misleading title... AMD's dual core Opteron & Athlon 64 X2 - Server/Desktop Performance Preview. The 939 is not equal to 940. Also, the article clearly says
    COMPARE ATHLON 64 X2... right on the 1st page. In fact the article does not admit to "not having a real x2" until page 13. I love reading anandtech's articles and visit frequently... Perhaps a better title would have been... Preview of Athlon64 X2 using an Opteron CPU.

  • mechBgon - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link

    http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/mechBgon/drool.jpg



    #82 says "and corporate PCs could work perfectly and more with a K5-K6/P2-P3."

    Ahhh, this again. You obviously haven't worked with a fully-armed installation of McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i. *evil grin* Hope you enjoyed your stay in 1999... welcome to 2005.

    ;)
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