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.
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Finally - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
one thing is missing.I'm much less interested in overclocking than I am interested in undervolting.
3 Weeks ago I bought two Phenom II X2 555 BE C3s for my girlfriend's new PC and mine - and guess what? Both unlocked to quad-cores easily. I was even able to lower the CPU voltage from 1.251V to a mere 1.141V. As a power consumption-meter is on its way to me, I will be able to report power saving numbers, if anyone is interested.
All this 4-core-goodness I got for a mere 75€ a pop.
If that's not great performance for an unbeatable price I don't know what is...
chrnochime - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
And like was mentioned in the article it's not guaranteed that whoever buys the 555/565 BE would be able to unlock the other two cores and run them just fine without instability.When it's a gamble and not 100% success rate, people who value their time and not wanting to return CPUs and getting another to test tend to either go down to the cheaper x3 or pay a bit more for the i3.
ajp_anton - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
I noticed you're using the x264 pass1 test for load power consumption.Is this really a good choise? All cores aren't maxed out in this test. This is obvious when knowing what x264 is actually doing in pass1 versus pass2, and comparing the speeds confirm this.
In pass2, all Phenom II's (x2, x4, x6) have exactly the same speed per core per GHz.
In pass1, the speed bumps are far from the nice linear scaling in pass2. The x6 is only twice (2.13x) as fast as the x2, so almost two cores are idle.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
You'll see this change in the next month when we revamp our Bench suite :)Take care,
Anand
nitrousoxide - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Yeah, expecting that. I don't quite understand why putting the stupid sysmark on the test...it just can't tell any difference between processors with different performance :)iwodo - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
There are rumours floating around that Intel is gonna make BIG price cut soon for holiday season due to lower then expected demand, clearing stocks for Sandy Bridge, as well as more people buying iPad then PCs.SandyBridge will be a top to bottom chip, leaving Current Nehalem for Servers. ( Which is doing VERY well in that area )
Some of the performance data are already leaked, the only things that is left is on the GPU side as well as Official benchmarks.
yuriylsh - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
just got a notification from Micro Center about $80 instant savings on i7-950, which means $200 for 3GHz Core i7 - not a bad deal. Is it starting?RyuDeshi - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
MicroCenter has been selling the 950 for $199 for a long time now. It has been on SlickDeals front page many times.. They just do that to get traffic to their store, then try to sell you everything else you don't need.jaydee - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
The Phenom II X2 565 is 18% (idle) and 23% (load) more efficient than the Phenom II X2 555?MrSpadge - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
The board has changed to a much more efficient one. It's approximately a constant offset between both configurations, as evidenced by the differences in idle numbers.MrS