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
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores.
The 1075T comes close to its competitors in the 3dsmax test, while the Phenom II X4 970 definitely falls short.
The quad-core Athlon II X4 645 does much better than the dual-core i3 530 (and by extension the 540). The same holds true for the Athlon II X3 450 vs. the Pentium G6950.
Cinebench R10
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
Single threaded performance is AMD's weakest point. Even at 3.5GHz the Phenom II X4 970 can't keep up with a turboed Core i5 750. If you run a predominantly single threaded workload, Intel will typically offer you better performance than AMD.
Turn up the thread count however and the value proposition shifts to AMD. The Phenom II X6 1075T gives you more for your money in a heavily threaded app than the Core i7 860, and the Phenom II X4 970 is a smidge ahead of the i5 750. The Athlon II X4 645 and Athlon II X3 450 both do very well.
I've started running Cinebench 11.5 in preparation for an update to Bench, some of the initial results are below:
The default benchmark is heavily threaded. As a result the scores echo what we just saw.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
98 Comments
View All Comments
hangfirew8 - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link
I love competition. I want choices, not just at the lower end price points.The real issue is that AMD has not improved their instructions per clock cycle ratio substantially since the earliest K8's. AMD caches have gotten larger, HT has gotten faster, power saving features have gotten more sophisticated, clock rates have gone up, but we've yet to see any real jump in core processing efficiency.
Until AMD addresses that they will stay on the low end, with the low end margins that come with that market.
bji - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
Fry's had a sale on these last week; you can see the advertisement for this sale at:http://newspaperads.mercurynews.com/FSI/Page.aspx?...
$179.99 for the Phenom II 1075T seemed like a good deal to me so I picked one up. I still don't even have any of the other system components I need to run this thing; but the deal was so good that I just had to jump. I'll buy motherboard, memory, etc later ...
The weird thing is the AMD seal on the top of the box lists it as a 1075T and says its clock rate is 2.8 Ghz. Didn't notice this until I got home. I wrote to AMD to ask about it and they replied that they had some printing problems with the labels and some boxes went to vendors with that printing error. But they assured me that it's really a 3.0 Ghz part.
Gilbert Osmond - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I notice on the photos of the chip packages it says:DIFFUSED IN GERMANY
MADE IN MALAYSIA
I've not seen the "Diffused in..." marker ever before on a chip package. What does it refer to / mean?
Gilbert Osmond - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I've found a complete (exhaustive) answer to my own question, here:http://www.faqs.org/rulings/rulings2007HQW968421.h...
The long and short is that the separate markings help to resolve an ambiguity about the country-of-origin.
LoneWolf15 - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
While I like Intel CPUs, it seems that good 1156/1366 mainboards are so expensive compared to Socket AM3.It'll be awhile before I replace my Q9650, but when it happens, if Intel hasn't worked with vendors to make mainboards more reasonably-priced, I see AMD as a real possibility.
Taft12 - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
It's not board OEMs that are causing motherboards to be unreasonably-priced, it is Intel with their chipset pricing. Despite moving the IGP off of the chipset (a huge cost elimination), the wholesale price stayed the same.3rd party chipset competition is needed desperately but Intel will have none of that! AMD boards definitely give you more for less.
mino - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
Actually this sad fact is affecting the AMD market too.It seems Nvidia has completely occupied the low-end market while AMD IGP boards have moved up on the price scale around $10.
Also check CPU prices - there is no AMD dual core below $60 with artificially sold single cores for $40.
Basically while the performance you can buy at $60 has gone up 2x over last 3 yrs on ADM side, their $40 offing is now useless while previously it was relatively reasonable.
AMD sees no competition from Intel there => no low end dual cores.
iamkyle - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link
For the majority of the market out there, you may be getting to a level where the performance of the CPU is good for what, embedded applications? Linux servers that can be run on used hardware for $20? Niche applications.At least there is speed at the low price points to fulfill a multitude of uses.
Taft12 - Friday, September 24, 2010 - link
I would think AMD's can't sell any CPU for less than about $65 without going deep into the red on every unit. Think about raw material costs, electricity, clean room maintenance, shipping, packaging, ... This is before accounting for any R&D or payroll for a single employee!Similarly, I think we're at an absolute floor at about $40 right now for hard drives.
SonicIce - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
good article and good cpu's. you should highlight which chips are the new ones in the beginning chart