AMD's New Year Refresh: Athlon II X4 635, Phenom II X2 555, Athlon II X2 255 & Athlon II X3 440
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 25, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3dsmax Performance
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:
The trend continues under 3dsmax. If you're running a highly threaded workload, there's no better value than the Athlon II X4 635 (although the Core i3 530 does come close). For the price of a dual-core CPU, the Athlon II X3 440 does the same thing.
With the Phenom II X2 555 BE performing similarly to the Pentium E6300, it'll be slower than the equivalently priced E6600. Surprisingly enough, AMD's new dual-core options aren't really that interesting in multithreaded workloads.
Cinebench R10 Performance
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
And this is where the tradeoff becomes apparent The Athlon II X4 and X3 have the single threaded performance of a value dual-core Intel CPU. Crank up the thread count and the X3 and X4 do very well, but on more normal tasks they sub-optimal. These chips are for those who know exactly what they want.
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mindless1 - Saturday, January 30, 2010 - link
Not necessarily, some e-series run any given frequency at a lower voltage, so by the same token whatever a non-e can do undervolted, an e- might do a bit higher speed at same voltage.Further, not all boards allow undervolting much, if at all, especially when you're trying to build a very small system. Big system with full mATX or ATX board with full o'c features, and silent fans is something just about any Tom, Dick, and Harry can build with no need to pick an e-series or undervolt a regular CPU.
play2learn - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Not everybody have up to date CPU:s. Anand, it would be fun if you sneak in an old processor like pentium 3, 4 or Pentium D next time.Taft12 - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - link
Anand did just that back in when Phenom II X2 and Athlon II X2 were released:http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
It was an embarrassment, no self-respecting hardware geek should be using that crap when the cheapest CPU and motherboard on the market today buries that stone-age technology.
mindless1 - Saturday, January 30, 2010 - link
... but to many geeks, it's the love of tech, not the ePenis you claim by virtue of your system performance.I mean really, there is a point where even a geek takes a sensible position about what is appropriate for the work or play they actually do. Would you be amazed to know I still have a Celeron 500MHz fileserver running? The geek in me made it right in the first place including beefed up mobo capacitors, very open heatsink that takes years to get appreciable dust in it, filtered intake/positive pressure, and a few others things faster, but inferior for the purpose, systems have today.
mindless1 - Saturday, January 30, 2010 - link
lol, meant ... DON'T usually have today.play2learn - Thursday, January 28, 2010 - link
You have a point there. But then there are people like me that's still not satisfied with today's technology and just sit and wait and wait for that ultimate experience to show up. If you want me to buy a new system today (which is not going to happen) I need to be humiliated more than once.ssj4Gogeta - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Won't it skew the graphs (eg. a bar too long to fit or a bar too small to be visible)NJoy - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Sure it would. Last week just out of curiosity I decided to run CinebenchR10 on a Dell Precision with dual Xeons (PD 3Ghz based, 4 threads) against C2D E8400. Guest what? Over 4 minutes for Xeons whilst about 2:20 for C2D. Humiliation...mattscottshea - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
These are assumptions made by current naming standards. However, if these were to hold true, it would be quite a coup by AMD as there current unreleased top of the line 975 will run at 3.6GHz with 4 cores at 140W using the C3 stepping.AMD Phenom II X6 1075T 3.6GHz 6 cores / 125W (D1 stepping?)
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 3.2GHz 6 cores / 95W
AMD Phenom II X6 1035T 2.9GHz 6 cores / 95W
AMD Phenom II X4 960T 3.3GHz 4 cores / 95W
MrSpadge - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
LOL. Naming conventions are there to lure people into buying just when you break the convention (*looking at the greenteam*)Anyway, their process has not magically changed - otherwise todays CPUs would be more energy efficient. And a new stepping is not going to turn the world upside down.. maybe a gain of 5% power at similar settings and a slightly higher clock speed at similar power levels.
And today you're getting 4 cores at 3.4 GHz for 140 / 125W. They'll be lucky and need heavy speed binning to get 3 GHz at 140W for the best 6-core CPU.