The Athlon II X2 & Phenom II X2: 45nm Dual-Core from AMD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
The Pentium E6300 pulls ahead in our CS4 benchmark; it's faster than both the Phenom II 550 and the Athlon II 250. Note the significant increase in performance from the Athlon X2 7850 to the Athlon II X2 250. All of the benefits of the Phenom II architecture are wrapped into the new Athlon II.
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:
DivX performance is very close between all three contenders. The E6300 and Phenom II 550 are virtually tied while the Athlon II 250 isn't far behind. For faster performance in encoding you need more cores though.
The Pentium EE 955, at one time an encoding monster, is now as fast as a Pentium E2160 in our DivX test.
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.
The latest version of the x264 codec fixes the problem exemplified in our first pass results, but these are still interesting to look at. Because of a number of unaligned memory loads all of Intel's pre-Nehalem Core based processors are penalized. The result is both the Athlon II and Phenom II are ahead of the E6300 here.
In the second pass of the test however, things return to "normal". The E6300 is technically in between the two new AMD dual-core chips, but all three basically perform the same. The Phenom II X3 710 adds another 40% to the processor cost and yields an extra ~20% in performance.
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.
Under WME, both of the AMD chips are a bit faster than the E6300. Note that even the triple-core Phenom II 710 is slower than the Phenom II X2 550; not all applications work well with AMD's odd 3-core configuration.
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TA152H - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
I agree with almost everything you say, I only have a small caveat.Intel chips will suffer much less from this than AMD, since they have an inclusive cache architecture, and can readily read the information from the L3 cache. I still think AMD has an exclusive cache arrangement, which I really think they should change with regards to the L3 cache for reasons just like the one you mention.
For what's it's worth, Microsoft screwed Intel 14 years back when the Pentium Pro was released. Naturally, Intel got the blame for having miserable 16-bit performance (it was related to segmentation, which was part of all the 16-bit modes, and technical, even 32-bit mode even though it was transparent), because Microsoft told them the world will be 32-bit by then. Of course Windows 95 had a lot of legacy code, and Windows NT, which we called "Not There" at the time, was about as common as a 20 year old virgin in western Europe. So, Intel took the blame, just like AMD is now, despite, once again, Microsoft's incompetence.
Really, if you think about it, the ability to clock the processors differently could be a very useful features, except for the fact Winblows can't use it properly.
Good
TA152H - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
First, I like seeing the Pentium 4s in the benchmarks, it was kind of interesting. They did better than I thought they would, and it makes me even more curious what they would be like on 45nm, since their clock speeds would probably be astronomical (since 45nm has much better power characteristics, and the clock speed limiter on the Pentium 4 was power use/heat).But, anyway, why not use the Pentium 4 670 (3.8 GHz), or Pentium EE 965 Extreme Edition (3.73 GHz) processors? Why use the next to fastest ones?
Don't get me wrong, it was still informative, but I would have liked to see the fastest measured against today's processors, not one step removed. Even so, it was nice to see them, so it's just a minor complaint. I'm looking forward to seeing the Nano.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
Might not have had any around. Figure the "best of breed" were the most likely to be either sold or go in a system for some family member when they were no longer needed for comparison duties.ShangoY - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
I am curious as to why the current cheapest Intel quad core were not included in the benches yet you bothered to go grab the previously $999 Pentium 4 and then also included the Phenom X4 940.Gary Key - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?b=2">http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?b=2 - You can compare them here.Kenzid - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
Does any body know why AMD transistor density is very low compare to Intel? Is this because of Intel High K metal process or the architechture?Goty - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
It's more than likely due to the fact that Intel has much higher cache densities than AMD does. It probably had very little to nothing to do with the actual process (well, beyond the geometry size, that is).TA152H - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
What are you basing that on?Typically, cache is very dense, so you will notice transistor count increasing disproportionately to size as you add cache.
With respect to the Athlon II X2 being larger than the Penryn, that's not really a bad thing, since it does more too; the Penryn needs a memory controller on the chipset that the Athlon II does not.
Kenzid - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
Based on above die size chart. Core2Duo 107mm2 and 410million transistors while Athlon II has only 234million transistors on 117mm2. It's almost half of the number of Intel used on theirs. IMC take that much space?TA152H - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
Well, take a look at the Pentium version, and you'll see the what I was saying about the cache. We both can agree it's the same core, but one has a larger cache.The Pentium is 82 mm2, with 228 million transistors, with a 2.064 megabytes of cache (L1 + L2). But, since 1 megabyte is disabled, it's really 3.064, like the other Wolfdale's have. The 6 MB version of the Core 2 is 107 mm2 with 410 million transistors.
So, you can see that adding 3 MB of cache increased the transistor count by 182 million, but the size by only 25 mm2. Or, in other words, it increased transistors by about 80%, but size by about 31%. So, cache does increase transistor count disproportionately to die size.
Oh, and yes, the IMC is quite large. You can view some of the pictures of the CPU die to see it, but it's far from insignificant in size.