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- Posted in
- CPUs
Multitasking Scenario 2: File Compression
For our next test, we simulated what would happen if we performed two disk intensive tasks at the same time: zipping the source code to Firefox while importing a 260MB PST file into Outlook 2003. You'll note that this is a slightly modified version of the test that we originally created. We modified the test by archiving the Firefox source instead of a single smaller file; the reason being that we wanted a more realistic test (from a file size/count perspective) as well as the ability to discern better between contenders.We ran the same Firefox and iTunes tasks from the last test again, and then did the following:
1) Open Outlook.
2) Start importing 260MB PST.
3) Start WinRAR.
4) Archive Firefox source.
WinRAR remained the application in focus during this test.
Here, we looked at two metrics: how long it took WinRAR to compress our test file, and how many emails were imported into Outlook during the time that WinRAR was archiving. Let's have a look at the results:
Update: AnandTech reader manno pointed out that the metric we should be looking at here is emails imported per second while the archive task was running. Looking at these numbers, Intel actually comes out ahead with the Pentium D 840, with AMD in second place. All of the dual core chips outperform the single core Athlon 64 FX-55 by a huge margin, and once again, we see that Hyper Threading isn't always beneficial as the Extreme Edition actually runs slower than the regular Pentium D here.
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Zebo - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
It's all good Jep. I was mainly hoping you'd link me to a real live X2 over at xtreme which is why I persisted;)Minotar - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
All I can say is WOW!!! AMD keeps kicking more and more ass!!!!!!Jep4444 - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
why would i make this up? im just saying what i was told, for all i know that person made it upPS if anyone tries to comment and i dont respond within the next 3 days, its cause i wont be on, not cause im backing out of what i said
Zebo - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
Frankey Jep I'm not buying it. It would cost AMD signifigantly more to make these dual 1MB L2 cores different at the core level. 8XX, 2XX, 1XX, and X2 are identical except for tracing in the pakageing and pins to make them function differently. Check out Tomshardware's recent CPU article about AMD manufacturing and you'll see what I'm talking.Jep4444 - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
im not trying to start a rumour, im very much pro AMD(and if you knew me, i generally dislike attention)all im saying is dont decided it'll be so fast until we see the real thing
Son of a N00b - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
#107......rumor.....looking for attentin....engineering sample...of course rushed....BIOS........shhhh jep...........period:-P
Filibuster - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
If you've actually read through this entire thing, congratulations!Jep4444 - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
#98 what i heard is from word of mouth, not from the site itselfwhile it is true they don't OC very well, apparently the Athlon X2 was rushed and so its functionality wasn't as good as the Opteron 875
from what i hear they don't multi-task nearly aswell as the Opteron does but single threaded performance should still be up to par
the Athlon 64 has had changes made to the ALU amongst other places which would differentiate it from the Opteron aswell
keep in mind i have no actual proof of this and i would love to be wrong but the guys at XS generally know what they're talking about
UzairH - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
AT should run the doom 3 tests again, this time not using the timedemo but actual gameplay run-throughs. If Doom3 uses a seperate thread for physics then dual-core should definitely benefit.fitten - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
#102 ++