AMD Sempron: A Fresh Take on Budget Computing

Pricing, Roadmap and Model Information

This is where things get interesting in the budget market. We'll start off with the AMD to Intel comparison, and then we'll move on to the interesting part.

From our RealTime Pricing engine, Celeron's show up at NewEgg for the following prices:

Intel Celeron D 335: $127
Intel Celeron D 330: $97
Intel Celeron D 325: $88

As the Sempron isn't on the market yet, we have to go on pricing from AMD in orders of 1000 units. The line-up on these processors is as follows:

AMD Sempron 3100+: $120
AMD Sempron 2800+: $103
AMD Sempron 2600+: $79
AMD Sempron 2500+: $69
AMD Sempron 2400+: $52
AMD Sempron 2300+: $45
AMD Sempron 2200+: $39

So, what we have here is just about price parity among the top two budget processors from AMD and Intel. Again, we don't have any "real" retail numbers on Sempron yet, but these should be very close to prices at which these processors hit the street.

Because of the clock speeds of the K7 Sempron processors, we expect to see the Sempron 2800+ perform on par with an Athlon XP 2600+, which would put it above the new Celeron processors in most cases. And we'll revisit price/performance after we take a look at the performance tests.

The most interesting thing to note with respect to pricing is that the 166MHz FSB Tbred Athlon XP 2600+ can easily be found for between $70 and $80. That means that AMD's new budget line (except for the 3100+) loses out in price/performance to the mainstream chip on which it is based.

On the flip side, if overclocked and rebranded processors were a problem for AMD before (from the justification for their multiplier lock), how much more of a problem will it be for them to have aging cheap Tbred AXPs underclocked, rebranded as Semprons, and sold for more money? Granted, there aren't that many of those processors on the market right now, but it is some food for thought.

Here's a quick summary of Sempron's common features.

• 130nm manufacturing process
• 256KB L2 cache size
• 128KB L1 cache size

The K8 Sempron has the normal advantages that an Athlon 64 would have (except for the x86-64 part). Sempron for Socket 754 has an on-die memory controller, and runs memory at DDR400 speeds, which greatly enhances memory intensive performance over its K7 cousin. Thus, the K8 part with a 200MHz lower clock speed is rated 300 performance rating points higher than the K7 part - not that we put much stock in the performance of these budget chips.

We've complained about the model number rating system every chance we have thus far, but to be fair, AMD has a lot of ground to make up against Intel, and they need every advantage they can get. The fact that the new aggressive model numbers step on the toes of existing AMD products is kind of a side effect. Here's why:

The new performance rating system is independent of any previous rating system and based solely on relative performance among other Sempron processors in a suite of benchmark suites. Specifically, AMD uses:

PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004
PC Magazine Content Creatoin Winstone 2004
SYSmark 2004 Office Productivity Overall
SYSmark 2004 Internet Content Creation Overall

We test part of this suite in our budget benchmarks, but we really don't have our hands on enough of the Sempron line to tell how their relative performance numbers actually indicate relative performance.

The reason why AMD focused on these suites when rating their Sempron line is that games and high performance software aren't the typical target market for budget processors. While this is perfectly acceptable, and an isolated relative scale is also acceptable, "arbitrarily" picking a single fixed point around which to scale performance numbers has led to more aggressive ratings.

Of course, if a consumer or a company is looking at building a lot of budget systems, they are going to look at equivalent price points and equivalent "performance" (by that, I mean megahertz or performance rating). The problem is that whether or not AMD wants to do things "right", they still have to sell product to the consumer. With a Sempron 2800+ cheaper than an Intel Celeron 335 (2.8GHz), people who don't understand that numbers don't mean quality will pick the cheaper part (unless they are brainwashed by the Intel brand name). People who know what's going on will understand that the Sempron 2800+ is higher performing than the Celeron 335 and will buy it if it reflects the level of performance that they desire at that price point.

The final aspect of these chips we would like to mention is power dissipation. All of the new Sempron line are designed to maximally dissipate 62W of power. This is on par with AMDs other CPUs, and we are also hearing that we might should expect mobile versions of the Sempron to be rated at less than half the wattage of their desktop counter parts. We don't know when this line of processors will be launced at this time.