AMD Athlon II X4 620 & 630: The First $99 Quad Core CPU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 16, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
Par2 is healthily threaded so the Athlon II X4s continue to do well here. The Q8200 inches by the 620, but for all intents and purposes it's the same speed as the $99 fighter from AMD.
WinRAR - Archive Creation
Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:
The roles are reversed here, and all of the AMD architectures prove faster than their similarly priced Intel alternatives.
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Eeqmcsq - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
The L2 cache in the Athlon II X4s are the same as the Phenom II X4, 512KB per core, 2MB total. It is only on the Athlon II X2s that the cache was doubled to 1MB per core, 2MB total.TA152H - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Oh, OK. I guess I should actually read the charts.Thanks.
Hmmmmm, I wonder why they overclock so poorly. It doesn't make much sense. You'd think it would use less power, and generate less heat. Strange.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Two options: 1) New die, takes time to get the mix perfect for better yields/higher clock speeds, or 2) the chip isn't using super high frequency/high leakage transistors to maximize performance. It could be designed to hit lower frequencies.Take care,
Anand
Eeqmcsq - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
The skeptic in me says bad design problems, like the first Phenoms. That could also account for the multiple delays and pushbacks on the Athlon X4s. But in all seriousness, I have no idea.Eeqmcsq - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Found this on another site. Perhaps you can check and confirm:"...the imprint "AADAC” identifies the CPU as a Propus."
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
My 620 is an AADAC while my 630 is an AACYC. I will ask AMD to confirm :)Take care,
Anand
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Spoke with AMD this morning. The OPN does not indicate whether or not the chip has a disabled L3. It's just luck of the draw, there's no way to tell by looking at the chip itself.Take care,
Anand
Doormat - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Please upgrade to a more modern x264 benchmark. I'd recommend a recent handbrake snapshot (http://handbrake.fr/snapshot.php)">http://handbrake.fr/snapshot.php). The nehalem optimizations should boost performance dramatically and are a better representation of what people would get with current encoders.Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
I agree completely, the question is more one of when we make the transition. There's a lot of historical data we need to compare to. You'll see a slow transition to new tests especially with the final version of Windows 7.Take care,
Anand
Lunyone - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Finally we have quad cores at about $100!! Hope that this will spur on better pricing on all fronts! Go AMD, we need the competition to drive down better pricing. Now only if you would drop down the PhII x4 955/965 pricing to compete better with the i5 750!!