AMD Phenom Preview: Barcelona Desktop Benchmarks
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 10, 2007 12:03 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
We can't draw too many sweeping conclusions based on the data here today, but here's what we do know:
- Gaming performance is much improved with Barcelona over K8, this is most likely a result of the improvements to the SSE engine and the wider front end of the core.
- Encoding performance is improved (again SSE128 rearing its head), but 3dsmax saw an unexpectedly large performance improvement.
- With a 10 - 15% increase in performance on average, Phenom should be more competitive than K8 was on the desktop (as expected).
Here's where things get complicated; we knew Phenom/Barcelona would be faster clock for clock, it was only a matter of how big of an improvement we'd get. If we are to believe that 15% is the best we'll get on average, taking into account that Penryn is around 5% faster than Conroe, the updated architecture from AMD alone isn't enough to really compete with Intel. In other words, price matters.
We saw how competitive AMD became after the first round of price cuts this year, but after the second set Intel went back to dominating. The trouble for AMD this time around is that Phenom is a much larger chip than the outgoing Athlon 64 X2, whereas Intel's Penryn family will actually be smaller than Conroe. AMD is already losing a considerable amount of money each quarter, so fabbing a larger chip at the same price as current CPUs will only make the situation worse. However, Intel can afford to continue to keep its processors as aggressively priced, especially moving to 45nm.
To put it plainly: Phenom/Barcelona make this price war more difficult on AMD, while Penryn makes it easier on Intel. What's the end game? Is there a solution? We're not sure, all we know today is a starting point for Phenom expectations.
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lopri - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Was thinking the exact same thing. Because the ~20% advantage in games just didn't make sense considering that the gaming benchmark is probably the most single-threaded in nature. If taken as its face value, the performance gain would be huge (which only would grow as the number of core increases).PlasmaBomb - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
CPU-z says the voltage required to achieve 2.5GHz on a Barcelona was 1.52V, what was it set to in the BIOS?Spuke - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
...it looks like AMD will be a great alternative to Intel. The present K8 is already competitive performance-wise with Conroe and the Barcelona core looks to be MUCH quicker than K8. If Penryn is only 5% faster than Conroe, then I foresee Phenom being equal to Penryn. Well, that is unless you believe single digit gains to be LARGE advantages.Hulk - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
"The present K8 is already competitive performance-wise with Conroe..."Huh? Every review I've ever read comparing K8 with Conroe shows Conroe being significantly faster in 9 out of 10 tests at the same clockspeed.
Sunbird - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
And the reviews with P4s and A64 were showing the A64 winning 9 out of 10 at same clockspeeds, the megahertz myth is busted. The only thing that really matters is price to performance and to some overclocking and maybe platform cost and heat...strikeback03 - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Except the post being replied to did not mention price, only performance. In the desktop market Intel currently beats AMD clock for clock and their top parts are clearly faster than AMD top parts. Depending on how much you get your processor for, AMD can be competitive on price per dollar, but on pure performance not so much right now.Spuke - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I said competitive with Intel not "hair on fire" faster than Intel. Two different things. At the framerates these CPU's are getting nowadays, the performance differences are irrelevant at least in gaming and near irrelevant in other benchmarks. Unless you're making money of these systems where every second counts, the differences are truly insignificant. And I won't get into the J6P market.strikeback03 - Tuesday, September 11, 2007 - link
Well, I don't game, so framerates in that sense are rather meaningless to me. On the other hand if I have a couple hundred photos to convert from RAW to TIFF, then open in CS2 and apply some other corrections, the time savings of running on a 3GHz quad-core C2D over a 3GHz AMD solution (1 or two processor) can be significant. I'd imagine those who do video rendering feel the same way.Regs - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
It's really too early to tell. It's what we all expected. They should of been released at 2.6 and scaled up to 3.0+ Ghz. Not 1.8 to 2.5 Ghz.hirschma - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I'd love to know what happens when a Barcelona is inserted into an AMD 4x4 platform. Does it work?