AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 4: Desktop Performance

Content Creation & General Usage Performance

Content Creation Performance Content Creation Winstone 2003 (Score in Winstones - Higher is Better) Intel Pentium 4 3.0C AMD Opteron 244 (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) 49.0 40.2 37.1 32.0 31.6 | 0 | 10 | 20 | 29 | 39 | 49 | 59

There's less than a 2% performance difference between the Barton and Thoroughbred 1.80GHz Athlon XP cores, meaning that this benchmark isn't going to benefit too much from the Opteron's larger cache. With that said, the 27% performance increase over an identically clocked Athlon XP is nothing to scoff at; the Opteron 244 is even faster than the Athlon XP 3000+.

Unfortunately for AMD, it will take much more than a 1.80GHz Athlon 64 in order to dethrone the Pentium 4 here; the 3.0C has no less than a 22% performance advantage over the Opteron 244.

General Usage Performance Business Winstone 2002 (Score in Winstones - Higher is Better) AMD Opteron 244 (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz - Barton) Intel Pentium 4 3.0C AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) 40.4 39.6 35.5 33.8 33.3 | 0 | 8 | 16 | 24 | 32 | 40 | 48

Under business applications, the situation changes dramatically; for starters, the applications are much more influenced by cache size as is evident by the Barton vs. Thoroughbred comparison. The Pentium 4 also doesn't fair too well in this test, as most business applications (and integer code in general) are branch-heavy, favoring shorter pipelined architectures with small mispredict penalties.

At 1.80GHz, the Opteron 244 is able to outperform its identically clocked Athlon XP sibling by a healthy 21%, just barely outperforming the Athlon XP 3000+.