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AMD's dual core Opteron & Athlon 64 X2 - Server/Desktop Performance Preview

 by Anand Lal Shimpi, Jason Clark & Ross Whitehead on April 21, 2005 9:25 AM EST
144 Comments | Add A Comment
144 Comments

Business/General Use Performance

Business Winstone 2004

Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:
  • Microsoft Access 2002
  • Microsoft Excel 2002
  • Microsoft FrontPage 2002
  • Microsoft Outlook 2002
  • Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
  • Microsoft Project 2002
  • Microsoft Word 2002
  • Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
  • WinZip 8.1

Business Winstone 2004

Business Winstone is a good example of a collection of single threaded applications used in a relatively light multitasking manner; the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ does better than Intel's fastest dual core CPUs, but it is still slower than the fastest single core AMD chips.

Office Productivity SYSMark 2004

SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:
"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."

Communication SYSMark 2004

Right off the bat, we see that the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ is reasonably competitive. Here, it is within striking distance of the FX-55, but all of the contenders are fairly close in performance.

The next test is Document Creation performance, which shows very little difference in drive performance between the contenders:
"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."

Document Creation SYSMark 2004

With a score of 224, we have a new record for performance. Remember that the Athlon 64 has never been able to execute more than one thread at a time. So, the performance benefit that AMD will see from dual core can be larger than what Intel has seen simply because Intel has had Hyper Threading on all of their desktop Pentium 4 CPUs for quite some time now. This is one such example where AMD gets a pretty big benefit from dual core, with the 4400+ outpacing the FX-55.

The final test in our Office Productivity suite is Data Analysis, which BAPCo describes as:
"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."

Data Analysis SYSMark 2004

The 4400+ offers the best performance that AMD can, but this test clearly favors Intel's Pentium 4/D architectures more.

Microsoft Office XP SP-2

Here, we see in that the purest of office application tests, performance doesn't vary all too much.

Microsoft Office XP with SP-2


Mozilla 1.4

Quite possibly the most frequently used application on any desktop is the one that we pay the least amount of attention to when it comes to performance. While a bit older than the core that is now used in Firefox, performance in Mozilla is worth looking at as many users are switching from IE to a much more capable browser on the PC - Firefox.

Mozilla 1.4


ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0

ACDSee is a popular image editing tool that is great for basic image editing options such as batch resizing, rotating, cropping and other such features that are too elementary to justify purchasing something as powerful as Photoshop for. There are no extremely complex filters here, just pure batch image processing.

ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0

Once again, we find the X2 4400+ in between the two high end Athlon 64s and the two dual core Intel chips.

Dual Core Desktop Performance: AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Multitasking Content Creation
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  • MDme - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    #133

    i think what #130 was saying was that: from top to bottom, AMD's offerings are really good...if you want the best "bang for the buck" the 3400+ or whatever, or a 3000+ winnie OC'd will provide you with the best performance per dollar you spend...EVEN against the X2's.

    On the other hand if cost is not an issue, an X2 4400+ provides extremely good performance for people willing to pay the $500 premium.

    Zebo's point is in direct response to your point, which is AMD "STILL" has the best bang for the buck, not intel.

    or maybe YOU missed the logic? LOL

  • MPE - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    "Intel is just lucky a 3400+ new castle wasn't in that test suite. It's would win the majority of tests over an 830!! and it's still cheaper. Or did you miss this chart? LOL"

    Why not just admit it. AMD's DC is about 10-20% faster while costing 80-100% more.

    Even if the 3400+ is added, that comparison is moot since if you compare the score of that to the price of AMD's own DC - the price performance ratio is stagerrring? Or did you miss that logic?

    Anyways did you miss the part that even AMD DC was being beaten by their own single core.

    Next.

  • nserra - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    "The Athlon 64 4000+ was the last single core member of the Athlon 64 line.
    The Athlon 64 FX will continue as a single core CPU line, with the FX-57 (2.8GHz) due out later this year."

    Where did you get this info anand, i am not sure if an Athlon64 X2 4400+ could not coexist with a Athlon64 4400+. If this is the last 4000+ than i must say gee thats too bad....

  • Zebo - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    #125

    Techreports review is better for you. 64-bit OS, 64-bit apps when possible, no mystery unreproducable benchmarks like Anand's database stuff.

  • Zebo - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link

    MPE BS, Intel is just lucky a 3400+ new castle wasn't in that test suite. It's would win the majority of tests over an 830!! and it's still cheaper. Or did you miss this chart? LOL
    http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/amd/athlon...

    Intels DC chips can hardy compete with AMDs single core offerings. Side by side both DC it's a joke.

    So ya, AMD still has the "best bang for the buck" top end to bottom end. And they a far on top of the mountain.

  • MPE - Monday, April 25, 2005 - link

    Isn't the shoe on the other foot?

    For several years now, so many touted AMD's cheaper price and competative pricing.

    Now with Pentium4 D, especially with the 3GHz model, you get half the price of the cheapest X2 while probably at best 20% lower performance?

    What happened here?

    Now P4D 3GHz model is the best bang for the buck and not the AMD offering. This is a complete reversal of what a lot of AMD supporters have been touting?

  • ceefka - Monday, April 25, 2005 - link

    #125 Yeah, good point.

    Compare:
    A. singletreaded 32-bit app on a singlecore
    B. multi-threaded 64-bit app on a dualcore
    Considering that multithreaded apps already see such large gains on dualcores, going 64-bit too could well mean a more than 100% improvement from A to B.

    But of course, NO ONE needs dual core, 64-bit and +4GB memory in the next 5-10 years :P

    The ball now lies with MS and (Linux) app developpers to write more stuff in multithreaded 64-bit code. From what I hear and read it is not so much the 64-bit part as it is the threading that is a real challenge, even for veterans.

  • Ross Whitehead - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link

    Visual, On P.12 I was referring to the closest Xeon competitor to the 252s which is the Quad Xeon 3.6 GHz 667 MHz FSB.

    Does that make any more sense?

  • Ross Whitehead - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link

    jvarszegi, the actual stored procs are not prefixed with "sp_", we just used that as part of the "analogy" to the real system.

    One could also argue that we did not prefix the analogy example with the object owner either which also incurs a cache miss.

    Honestly, I have never quantified the expense of the sp_ prefix or the object owner.

  • Binji7 - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link

    Where are the dual-core Windows x64 and Linux x64 benchmarks?? That's what I really want to see.

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