AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4800+ & 4200+ Dual Core Performance Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 9, 2005 12:02 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
Now armed with final silicon, our stance on AMD's Athlon 64 X2 doesn't change at all - AMD clearly has the faster overall dual core desktop solution, but at a price that will be out of reach for most users. Eventually, AMD's pricing will fall to a level that is far more reasonable, but unfortunately, that time won't be until 2006 at the earliest. We've already looked at the slow dual core vs. fast single core debate, but be prepared to be put in that very position later this year as both AMD and Intel bring their dual core CPUs to market at very different price points.What we did find interesting was that while AMD generally maintains a large performance advantage in single threaded applications, our multitasking scenarios were a mixed bag of results between AMD and Intel. The multitasking gaming tests were obviously very strongly in favor of AMD, but the general usage tests were more mixed between AMD and Intel. In many cases, Intel's Pentium D actually pulled ahead in terms of performance.
Also, in our multitasking tests, there were a couple of cases where we saw no major performance difference between the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and 4200+. It was mostly in the single application (both single and multi-threaded) that we saw the most noticeable performance difference between the two CPUs.
The other thing we continue to see is that dual core with Hyper Threading in these multitasking environments is very much the double-edged sword. There are some situations where having both Hyper Threading and dual core gives Intel a huge performance boost, but there are others where the exact opposite is true. As it currently stands, we're not sure how much of a future Hyper Threading will have in future Intel architectures - but it's definitely not a sure win.
With the last of our product-specific dual core previews out the door, now we all play the waiting game. But with both AMD and Intel pushing dual core heavily, we can only hope that the wait won't be too long - especially from the standpoint of improving software support for dual core systems. Today, we're able to show some very tangible performance gains for dual core CPUs in multitasking usage environments, but in the future, single application performance should get a very tangible performance boost as well.
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FlakPanzer - Monday, June 20, 2005 - link
This looks very promising, my next rig is definately going to have one of these fine AMD X2 processors.cryptonomicon - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
anand, thanks for the preliminary overclocking results. me and my DFI compadres are very eager to see how this chip overclocks and hope you add an overclocking page section as soon as you receive a production X2.gamara - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
Would be interesting to also see if DC had any affect on SLI performance. Not sure if the driver work of splitting the duties for 2 video cards would be streamlined with a second core on the processor.coldpower27 - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
#88 are you talking about the PD 3.0GHZ 356US or the PD 2.8GHZ 241US? The 3.2GHZ 530US is the worst price/performance DC in Intel's arsenal it cost more then twice as much as a single core and then some.Just like how the 4600+ and 4800+ are now costing more then twice the single core versions.
I don't understand why people are going to assume the motherboard is expensive. Why must you have the flagship 955X motherboard?
The lanuch pricing of the 955X is 50US, which is the same as the price of the 925X when it was launched.
There is also the 945P chipset to consider which also supports Dual Core and is a less expensive alternative price at 38US which is only 1 dollar more then what the i915P chipset cost at launch.
Since the chipsets base pricing match what the 925X and 915P were at launch we should logically assume that pricing of these chipsets will be similar to what i915 and i925 were at launch.
phaxmohdem - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
Oh yeah baby 100th post... how often do you get that honor? even if you have to cehat to get it *cough* post 99phaxmohdem - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
lalala ala al ala ala alaphilthedrill - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
#97, are you being serious? Read my post on #81.Performance drops with HT when there are memory bandwidth intensive apps due to the shared data TLB. The shared FSB also hurts Intel, and it only gets worse as you scale up with more processors.
AtaStrumf - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
Since the advent of HT on P4, AMD has been at a great disadvantage in multitasking scenarios and I thought dualcore would end that. Well, I guess P4 is just better at that. Really ironic, when AMD has touted K8 as being designed from ground up for DC and Intel just slapping two cores together - LOL.Nontheless AMD is still doing great with X2 chips, and I too can't wait to get one, since I think we all multitask non-stop, even if we don't realize it (AV, Antispyware, SETI, FAH, Word, IE, Firefox, Opera, Acrobat, ACDsee, Photoshop, Outlook, BT, eMule, ... and the we open a game on top of that). Just yesterday my A64 3200+ S754 / 1 GB RAM gave me real trouble with gazlion windows open, while writing my graduation paper. Had to restart the bastard, grrr.
Son of a N00b - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link
TY for including OC results...maybe a whole 'nother article on this?
Quanticles - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link
i think if ppl want AMD's prices to come down, then we should all pitch in and build a new fab for them