AMD's Winter Update: Athlon II X3 455, Phenom II X2 565 and Phenom II X6 1100T
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 7, 2010 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Phenom II X6
- Athlon II
- Phenom II
SYSMark 2007 Performance
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.
SYSMark 2007 is getting very long in the tooth and we're still another couple of quarters away from an updated version for 2011. That being said, it does function as a good representation of lightly threaded application performance. There's little to gain from moving to four cores here and basically nothing to be seen from the move to six cores. The Phenom II X6 1100T is within several percent of the performance of its Core i5/i7 competitors.
The lack of an L3 cache holds the Athlon II back, which is made evident by the solid performance increase seen by the 565 BE. Both of these parts are around 10% off of their competitive performance targets.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
In our Photoshop CS4 test, AMD has effectively equalled the performance of the Core i5 with the Phenom II X6 1100T. The i7 860 is a bit faster but the i5 comparison is very close. The Athlon II X3 455 is 15% faster than its closest competitor, the Pentium G6950. The Phenom II X2 565 BE doesn't get many points for its large cache, it's the third core that puts the Athlon II X3 ahead here.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
65 Comments
View All Comments
SandmanWN - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
The podiums in peoples basements just keep getting bigger and more nonsensical every day.IMPL0DE - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Bit-tech already admitted having Sandy Bridge in their test labs and Bulldozer is nowhere to be seen at the moment. Next year will be do or die for AMD. Their GPUs are awesome, they need to stiffen up the competition with their CPUs also. It's always the price, and the performace has been lacking for a while now. I'm and AMD user, but if Bulldozer disappoints I'll go with Sandy Bridge for my next build.Finally - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Seems like you are some creative, rendering type of PC user.Sadly/Gladly 90% are not.
Performance has become pretty irrelevant, hasn't it?
You get a 4-core @ 3GHz thrown at you for less than $100.
What of the things your average Joe does with his PC isn't possible with that kind of computer?
E-Mail? Ridiculous.
Surfing? Ridiculous.
Messaging? Ridiculous.
HD-Videos? Oh, come on!
Thanks to shabby console ports and stagnation in the PC Games market, you can easily run about any game with a 2 year old HD4870...
What exactly does Joe need more cores/GHz/performance for?
tim851 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
E-Mail/Surfing/Messaging/HD-Videos...You could do any of that with any of the first Athlon X2s, released in the Summer of '05.
If this is your mindset, what are you doing here? Isn't it pointless to follow CPU news for five years?
Finally - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
The argument is as follows:The hi-end/hi-performance market segmet is negligible.
If e.g. Apple really adopts AMD hardware for their fancy iSomething builds, they will be on the rise again.
nitrousoxide - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Die for AMD? In fact 2011 is a year for AMD to catch up much they have lost since 2007.Just look at what Intel will be doing:
1.ship the same crappy Atom and the revised 32-nm version won't come before Q4 2011--Ok, at ultraportable/netbook, Intel is doomed to fail in the face of mighty Brazos. It will retain some market at lower-TDP such as tablets but that's the world for Tegra 2.
2.launch the SNB, an architecural upgrade from Westmere, which suggest that you can't expect much performance boost from current dual-core Pentium and i3 parts. That means Intel's still got weak low-end products. Keep in mind that the dual-core SNBs will compete with Llano APUs with 4 revised K10 cores+HD5500 level IGP. The Athlon X4s can already dominate i3s, so we can't say i3 2000 series will do better job than Llano.
3. The high-end is always Intel's world. But this time life will be hard for SNB quad-cores and Westmere hex-cores. Bulldozer is the first new architecture since K8 (K10 is only an enhanced K8), it has eight cores running at crazy frequency as high as 4GHz. So I'm very certain that it can at least overrun the quad-core SNBs and have similar if not better performance with hex-core Westmeres. Well, there's an eight-core SNB-E, but it's not what AMD is concerned with. For AMD, returning to $300 market, controlled by today's i7 9 Series, is the biggest victory, the $1000 market is meaningless because you can't sell many chips on such outrageous price slot.
So things are not so bad for AMD in the next year as long as they ship their product on time and keep up the pace on Fusion Project.
anubis44 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
I don't think anybody is going to be disappointed by Bulldozer. Whereas Sandybridge is an incremental improvement, Bulldozer is a complete redesign. It's a totally new design compared to the K7/K8/Phenom I/Phenom II architecture. Basically, it's the first radically different design to come out of AMD since the launch of the Athlon in 1999, so that should tell you something. We're not going to be seeing modest, single percentage performance increase, it'll likely be on the order of 30-60% depending on what you're doing.Finally - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Phenom I was a redesign as well.I still have a bad aftertaste in my mouth when I think about it.
It took them until Phenom II to iron things out.
mino - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
"... Just two months ago AMD gave us the Athlon II X3 450 and the Phenom II X2 56[0], today we're..."Should be:
... Just two months ago AMD gave us the Athlon II X3 450 and the Phenom II X2 56[0], today we're...
Cheers.
mino - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
:D typo included also by me :)The original article has: "... Just two months ago AMD gave us the Athlon II X3 450 and the Phenom II X2 56[5], today we're..."