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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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  • MDme - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link

    #92

    the difference between an opteron and an a64/fx is as follows:

    opteron - needs ECC memory cache is 1mb it is multiplier locked, COHERENT HT LINKS

    a64 - uses non-registered (non-ecc) memory (which is faster), cache 512k-1mb, multiplier locked

    a64fx - non-ecc memory, 1mb cache, unlocked.

    so opteron's are not a64/fx's but are quite similar. the main difference is the memory type and the COHERENT HT links

    therefore the X2 4400+ is really an opteron (dual core) running at 2.2 with dual 1mb cache but with the COHERENT HT link disabled that uses non-ECC ram.

    performance should therefore be almost identical between one DC opteron 2.2ghz and one A64 X2 4400+ (possibly the X2 will be faster 5%) due to the non-ECC memory which is faster.


  • tygrus - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link

    If you use a Opteron 875 then label it as such in all diagrams. You can make a note that the Athlon64 X2 4400+ will perform similarly to the Opteron 875. The differences in MB and RAM will affect results and so a direct re-labelling should not be made.
    Good database, multimedia, data analysis should make good use of multi-core/multi-CPU systems. When I mention data analysis I'm talking about software like SAS 9.1.3 and SAP. Even SAS is only threaded for a few tasks and is a big hassel to pipeline one step into another.

  • Some1ne - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    Good article overall, although I question the validity of declaring that an Opteron 875 is roughly equivalent to an Athlon 64 4400+. I could be wrong, but surely there must be significant architectural differences between the server-class chip (top of the line server-class chip no less) and the desktop Athlon 64? If not then why the price premium for Opterons, and why don't manufacturers just find a way to kludge the Athlon64 to work in MP configurations as in theory if they are really equivalent when run at the same clock speed, it would be much more cost effective to use kludged Athlon 64's, and it would also let higher performance levels to be reached as the dual-core Athlon64's are slated to run at one clock increment higher than the fastest dual-core Opteron's? So anyways, is it *really* valid to treat an Opteron as being essentially equivalent to a similarly clocked Athlon64? As much as I love finally seeing Intel chips trounced pretty much across the board, it seems to me like the results could potentially be inaccurate given that an Opteron 875 was used and simply "labeled" as an Athlon64 4400+.

  • Cygni - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    #89... seeing as how the Opty x75 and A64 X2 are based on functionally identical cores, thats not too likely at all. What DOES seem likely to me reading this article is that BIOS updates, and X2 support on 939 boards, is going to be a very interesting story to follow. It doesnt look like its too easy to get a solid AMD Dual Core BIOS if even Tyan is struggling, of all board mfts. May give a fiesty smaller board mft a chance to slam the bigboys and grab marketshare (such as ECS with the K7S5A).

  • Jason Clark - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    saratoga, waah? There are similarities between C# and C++. While agree it's java'ish as well, it definitely has similarties to c++. One could say c# shaes similarities with c/c/c++.

    read away:

    http://www.mastercsharp.com/article.aspx?ArticleID...

    http://www.csharphelp.com/archives/archive138.html

    "C# is directly related to C and C++. This is not just an idea, this is real. As you recall C is a root for C++ and C++ is a superset of C. C and C++ shares several syntax, library and functionality." Quoted from above.

    L8r.




  • Jep4444 - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    I've spoken to a few people from XS who have Engineering Samples of the Athlon X2s and all im hearing is that arent nearly as good as the dual core Opterons, they were apparently rushed

  • xtknight - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    #86 - the r_smp cvar was disabled in quake3 in a patch, for a reason i don't know. i confirmed this by having quake3 crash on my p4 HT CPU with that setting enabled. as for doom3, i'm not sure. i'm guessing it's not implemented well enough yet...

  • Chuckles - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    #83:
    "Real gamers" may use a single core, but I have been hankering for duallies since I tried an older dual G4 to my newer single G4. Even on the crappy MaxBus, I could browse the web, chat, do "real work" and game, without having everything go to pot when a bolus of e-mail came in.
    When you buy a dualie of any type, you buy the ability to do other stuff while you computer working on its latest task. Remember that when you get lagged while Outlook downloads your latest spam.

  • Googer - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    Why wern't there any SMP Tests done on Quake 3 engine, after all it is said to be multithreaded.

    Also, Carmack said during the devlopment of DOOM3 that the engine was going to support multiple processors, did this ever happen? Does anyone know what the command might be for D3 console to enable SMP, like it's cousin? How much truth is there to this?

  • Nighteye2 - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    Add to all the arguments that we can potentially see programs taking advantage of this quite soon...without the effort required to implement full multi-threading, game functions could be assigned to use the other processor if it's available. For example, AI can be done by one core, while the other core does the rest of running the game.
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