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- Posted in
- CPUs
Multitasking Scenario 1: DVD Shrink
If you've ever tried to backup a DVD, you know the process can take a long time. Just ripping the disc to your hard drive will eat up a good 20 minutes, and then there's the encoding. The encoding can easily take between 20 and 45 minutes depending on the speed of your CPU, and once you start doing other tasks in the background, you can expect those times to grow even longer.For this test, we used DVD Shrink, one of the simplest applications available to compress and re-encode a DVD to fit on a single 4.5GB disc. We ran DVD Decrypt on the "Star Wars Episode VI" DVD so that we had a local copy of the DVD on our test bed hard drive (in a future version of the test, we may try to include DVD Decrypt performance in our benchmark as well). All of the DVD Shrink settings were left at default including telling the program to assume a low priority, a setting many users check in order to be able to do other things while DVD Shrink is working.
We did the following:
1) Open Firefox using the ScrapBook plugin loaded locally archived copies of 13 web pages; we kept the browser on the AT front page.
2) Open iTunes and start playing a playlist on repeat all.
3) Open Newsleecher.
4) Open DVD Shrink.
5) Login to our news server and start downloading headers for our subscribed news groups.
6) Start backup of "Star Wars Episode VI - Return of the Jedi". All default settings, including low priority.
This test is a bit different than the test we ran in the Intel dual core articles, mainly in that we used more web pages, but with more varied content. In the first review, our stored web pages were very heavy on Flash. This time around, we have a much wider variety of web content open in Firefox while we conducted our test. There is still quite a bit of Flash, but the load is much more realistic now.
DVD Shrink was the application in focus. This matters because by default, Windows gives special scheduling priority to the application currently in the foreground. We waited until the DVD Shrink operation was complete and recorded its completion time. Below are the results:
In this test, the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ does better than the Pentium D 840, but the Extreme Edition manages to offer slightly better performance. A faster X2 shouldn't have much of a problem remaining competitive, however.
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MDme - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link
#133i 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
#125Techreports 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? LOLhttp://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.