AMD's Phenom X3 8000 Series: Fighting Two Cores with Three?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 23, 2008 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Overall System Performance - SYSMark 2007
SYSMark 2007 is an application benchmark suite that plays back real world usage scenarios in four categories (E-Learning, Video Creation, Productivity and 3D), using the following applications:
Adobe After Effects 7
Adobe Illustrator CS2
Adobe Photoshop CS2
AutoDesk 3ds Max 8
Macromedia Flash 8
Microsoft Excel 2003
Microsoft Outlook 2003
Microsoft PowerPoint 2003
Microsoft Word 2003
Microsoft Project 2003
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 series
Sony Vegas 7
SketchUp 5
WinZip 10.0
Performance is measured in each individual category and then an overall score is reported.
AMD's Phenom continues to suffer under SYSMark, looking at overall system performance - Intel's Core 2 lineup is just stronger. The fastest triple-core CPU is on par with Intel's $133 dual-core E4700. It's also worth mentioning that the triple-core Phenom CPUs are barely any faster than the higher clocked, dual-core Athlon X2s.
Also pay close attention to the Core 2 Duo E7200, this little beauty manages to offer better performance than the E6550 despite having a slightly smaller L2 cache and slower FSB (3MB vs. 4MB and 1066MHz vs. 1333MHz).
The E-Learning suite mostly echoes what we saw in the overall SYSMark results.
The Video Creation tests have the triple-core Phenom X3 far more competitive, the fastest entry in the chart is actually the Phenom X4 9750.
The last two test suites show results in-line with what we've already seen under SYSMark: AMD's Phenom wasnt particularly speedy with four cores, and disabling one of them doesn't help any.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
The problem is without support in 100% of the titles it's not something you can really count on. If you go with too slow of a CPU, hoping to rely on GPU acceleration but then try and play a rip that isn't accelerated you're just out of luck.Regardless, I'm just waiting for the day when all platforms feature GPU acceleration :)
Take care,
Anand
ViRGE - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
"Now if you pirate your HD movies then none of this matters, as GPU accelerated H.264 decode doesn't work on much pirated content."Sure it does, the Cyberlink H.264/MPEG-2 decoder is a complete DirectShow-compliant module. Anything H.264 that can be played in a DirectShow application is accelerated by it, both legit and pirated content.
0roo0roo - Thursday, April 24, 2008 - link
it doesn't matter either way. pirated h264 content tends to be lower bitrate versions of the full hd rip.even at full bitrate it doesn't matter as processors have come to a point where even budget dual cores can decode h264 quite well.
ChronoReverse - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
And on the free software side, Media Player Classic Home Cinema (what a mouthful) also has GPU accelerated decode now too (only for the newer video cards though).While not all pirate content are encoded in a manner that can be accelerated, the functionality is available now.