AMD's Fall Refresh: New Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs Balance Price and Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 21, 2010 2:52 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Phenom II X6
- Athlon II
x264 HD Video Encoding Performance
Graysky's x264 HD test uses x264 to encode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.
Video encoding performance is a definite strength of the Phenom II X6. You get comparable performance to the more expensive Core i7 860. And without Hyper Threading, the Core i5s are unable to distance themselves from the Phenom II X4 970.
Again the Athlon II X4 645 and X3 450 dominate their respective competitors.
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.
The direct comparisons we've been pointing out this entire match continue to hold as we look at different applications. The Phenom II X6 1075T performs as it should, while the Phenom II X4 970 falls short of the i5 750. The triple and quad-core Athlon IIs couldn't be better.
7-Zip Benchmark Performance
Included in 7-zip is a pure algorithm test that completely removes IO from the equation. This test scales with core count and as a result we get a good theoretical picture of how these chips perform. Note that the actual 7-zip compression/decompression process is limited to 2 threads so there's no real world advantage to having more cores.
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iwodo - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
All these Athlon II and Phenom, are expected to complete against Sandy Bridge next year?( Since Bulldozer are not coming to Fusion type and low end CPU )
SandyBridge is coming to kick some ass then by the looks of it. Higher IPC, Higher Clock speed, lower Idle power, better Hyper Threading......
Apart from Fusion i am not excited by AMD's roadmap at all.......
Dark_Archonis - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I believe Llano is supposed to compete with Sandy Bridge, but the problem is Llano is coming to market later than Sandy Bridge. Until Llano comes, yes these Athlon IIs and Phenom IIs will be forced to compete with Sandy Bridge, and they are going to lose badly.Even when Llano comes, it's not supposed to be a big performance increase, so I think Sandy Bridge will rule the mainstream market.
As for Bulldozer, it will have to go up against Intel's socket 2011 Sandy Bridge models that are likely to be without integrated graphics. These models are rumored to have up to 8 physical cores, 40 lanes of PCI-E 3.0, and quad-channel DDR3.
Eeqmcsq - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
On the Video Encoding & Data Archive page, the graph for Par2 is in reverse. It has the Athlon II X2 255 at the top and the Core i7 860 at the bottom.Makaveli - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
Eeqmcsq the graph is correct.Look under the heading of the graph....
(Lower is better)
Eeqmcsq - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
Yes, I saw that. But Anand usually puts the best CPU at the top, not at the bottom. See the previous review for the Core i7 970.http://www.anandtech.com/show/3833/intels-core-i7-...
hangfirew8 - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
You write: "The Phenom II X6 1075T is an interesting chip as you get a lot of compute but it's only useful in heavily threaded apps."I strongly disagree, unlike you are calling virtualization "apps".
These chips are a godsend to developers, testers and sales who are running entire tiles of software. Need to test your client on XP, Vista and Windows 7? Need to run a web application server on Windows and an Oracle database backend on Linux? Need to do all of these at the same time? This is what a Hex Core chip is made for, not running a single heavily threaded app on a single O/S.
I'd like to see an AT Bench benchmark that covers this sort of application. I'd like to see how comparably priced Intel CPU's do versus AMD chips. I'm thinking this would be a huge differentiator between HyperThreading and actual cores, but I'd like to see the numbers before making any claims.
haplo602 - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
this is not quite comparable. on moderately IO dependant workloads (your web server/oracle db example), HT will do just fine. on compute dependant applications with little memory access, HT will bottleneck. However you will hardly run 4-6 compute dependant VMs at once every time.hangfirew8 - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link
I agree on your HTT assessment.BTW I mean "unless" not "unlike". Where's the edit button?
Can I get a reply from AT on VM? Can we stop treating every desktop chip as a gaming candidate-only chip and get some kind of desktop VM benchmark going here?
I'm thinking running one per VM: compile/link/install (push application from dev VM to web server VM over virtual network), web server with integrated JAVA application, three web clients, and a database backend. Run a mix of Linux & Windows, 32 and 64 bit O/S's. The app being compiled doesn't even have to be the app being run.
Accord99 - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
There's some tests done by the IT side of Anandtech:http://www.anandtech.com/show/2774/10
Relatively speaking, more cores offers a bigger boost than Hyperthreading, but a single Nehalems core is much more powerful than a AMD K10 core.
hangfirew8 - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link
Yes I know they can do it, but we have no data on how similarly priced desktop chips compete. HTT versus Cores is only one aspect. I want to see the AMD hex chips stretched against Intel quad cores in VM's and shake out the bang for buck. AT's attitude about hex cores only being useful for single heavily threaded apps just doesn't match how this chip is being marketed or how it is being used in the field.AT should realize that a lot of their PC gaming readers have daytime jobs not just as server administrators, but as software developers and testers. Management comes to us for advice and no one is providing us with the data to make informed decisions. 7Zip benchmarks are fine but give us a software development lifecycle benchmark using VM's, give us data on what we are already working with for several years in real life (work). Give us a benchtop VM benchmark! Please!