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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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