The Core 2 Quad Q8400: Intel's $183 Phenom II 940 Competitor
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 7, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
DivX 8.5.3 with Xmpeg 5.0.3
Our DivX test is the same DivX / XMpeg 5.03 test we've run for the past few years now, the 1080p source file is encoded using the unconstrained DivX profile, quality/performance is set balanced at 5 and enhanced multithreading is enabled:
Video encoding performance is a tie between our two competitors. Both perform among the fastest quad-core CPUs on the market today, but clearly under the devine i7. Looking at the Pentium E5300 performance we see that even early Core 2 Duo systems stand to see a 30% boost in performance by moving to one of these affordable quad-core alternatives.
If you want to extrapolate however, here's a fun game. It took Intel roughly three years to offer the performance of a $500 CPU in something that costs less than $80. By 2011 you'll be able to get this sort of performance at under $80 as well. Mmm, ubiquitous multi-core.
x264 HD Video Encoding Performance
Graysky's x264 HD test uses the publicly available x264 codec (open source alternative to H.264) to encode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.
AMD continues to have a large advantage in two pass x264 encoding thanks to a lot of unaligned loads that penalize Intel's pre-Nehalem architectures. The second, more strenuous pass shows the two contenders in a tie just as we saw in our DivX results:
Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Advanced Profile
In order to be codec agnostic we've got a Windows Media Encoder benchmark looking at the same sort of thing we've been doing in the DivX and x264 tests, but using WME instead.
While DivX and x264 both showed our contenders as equals, our WME test has the Phenom II 940 in the lead by nearly 6%.
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eXistenZ - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
Obviously, AMD is no good in Far Cry 2 game. K8, K10, K10.5, al these architectures were always slower than intel's competitors. And it is really crappy game, so i don't see any reason why are you testing right on this one. I think, more fair testing is with Crysis or CPU-eaters = RTS...Goty - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
Anand seems to be buying into all the FUD about AMD lately. Sure, AMD's not doing so hot right now, but they're not in much worse a position than they were in the middle of the P4 era (probably about the same position, all told).Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link
I'm not sure I would call it FUD. AMD lost $2.36B before taxes in the last four quarters combined. Their chief competitor made $6.13B. Now Intel has always made more than AMD, but the issue now is that AMD is losing a considerable amount every quarter. That can only continue for so long.What I'm more worried about is the impact this is having on the next-generation cores that AMD is developing. While engineering budgets are the last things to go, if you're losing a few hundred million a quarter everyone from marketing to engineering gets hurt.
Ignoring the problem isn't going to make it go away, I felt that it would be important to at least bring some of this stuff to the table so we can at least be thinking about it.
Take care,
Anand
microAmp - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
Actually, it's worse, they are running out of cash.ssj4Gogeta - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
"It's the beauty of Moore's Law: with fewer transistors crammed into a much smaller area, we're able to see the same performance."Shouldn't it be "MORE transistors crammed into a much smaller area"?
:)
hooflung - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
I am another that buys based on the ability of Virtualization via virt functionality. I got a P2 940 because I wanted the ability to have 4 cores to split up to VM's running Hyper-V, Xen and KVM. I just can't do that on new intel chips that fall in the price range right now.My C2D is still rocking a venerable 1ghz OC on a e4300 and P35 chipset. For me to install an OS to do development as the top level is just wasting wattages at my home.
snakeoil - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
''Phenom II Earns a Financially Troubled AMD Less per Chip than Core 2 Quad''well you are saying that amd make less money because phenom 2 has a little more area,but in your happy calculations you forgot that bad quad core dies are used to make tricores and soon dual cores phenoms.
harvesting.
what are you doing little annand
crimson117 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
One wafer costs a fixed amount to make; let's say $200.Let's say AMD can get 10 CPUs made from each wafer, while intel can get 20 smaller CPUs from each wafer. They each sell their chips for $180.
AMD puts $200/10 = $20 worth of wafer into each $180 CPU.
Intel only has to put in $200/20 = $10 worth of wafer into each $180 CPU.
So assuming all other things are equal, Intel makes $5 more on each CPU sale than AMD.
crimson117 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
*clicks Edit button*So assuming all other things are equal, Intel makes $10 more on each CPU sale than AMD.
mkruer - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
You are also forgetting that AMD and Intel use two different lithphogathy technologies to AMD uses submersion and Intel uses double pattering. The Submersion takes slightly longer then a single pattering, and yeild fewer defects. This meas that AMD should be able to preduce a high volume of chips per platter then Intel. Adding to the confusion, is that neiter intel nor AMD releases what there yeilds are and as such, too comepare based upon die size alone is folly. People can crunch the numbers anyway they want, but in the end it should be a, for more or less, wash.