AMD's Sempron 3300+: 90nm Budget Computing
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 18, 2005 2:10 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Business/General Use Performance
Business Winstone 2004
Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:
- Microsoft Access 2002
- Microsoft Excel 2002
- Microsoft FrontPage 2002
- Microsoft Outlook 2002
- Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
- Microsoft Project 2002
- Microsoft Word 2002
- Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
- WinZip 8.1
The Sempron is a much stronger business performer than the Celeron D - that hasn't changed since we first looked at the Sempron. The 3300+ offers barely any performance improvement over the 3100+ however.
Office Productivity SYSMark 2004
SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:
"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."
Once again, we see that the Sempron is stronger at business applications, but the 3300+ offers no real performance improvement over the 3100+.
The next test is Document Creation performance:
"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."
The final test in our Office Productivity suite is Data Analysis, which BAPCo describes as:
"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."
In the Data Analysis tests, the Celeron D actually outpaces the Sempron by a pretty good margin - just over 20%. The two Semprons perform identically, but it does show that the Celeron D can be quite competitive.
Mozilla 1.4
Quite possibly the most frequently used application on any desktop is the one that we pay the least amount of attention when it comes to performance. While a bit older than the core that is now used in Firefox, performance in Mozilla is worth looking at as many users are switching from IE to a much more capable browser on the PC - Firefox.
Mozilla has always favored architectures like the K8 and the Pentium M, so it is no surprise to see that the Sempron does a lot better than the Celeron D here.
ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0
ACDSee is a popular image editing tool that is great for basic image editing options such as batch resizing, rotating, cropping and other such features that are too elementary to justify purchasing something as powerful as Photoshop. There are no extremely complex filters here, just pure batch image processing.
Here, the Sempron 3300+ and the Celeron D offer basically identical performance.
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snorre - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
It seems like AMD also has enabled 64-bit support in this CPU:http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&a...
Even better value then I guess.
snorre - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
Tbuch - Sunday, June 5, 2005 - link
In a time where the Processors are named with a lot of Letter addition Anandtech (and others) must be very caryfully to use these letters. You have been using a Intel 915P Motherboard which is a Socket 775 bord - therefor the Celeron processor you have tested must be a Celeron D 345J (with a"J" addition) and not "only" a 345. Am I right?johnsonx - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
Interesting... the board's BIOS claims Cool'n'quiet support, and I loaded the latest processor driver from AMD that claims Cool'n'Quiet support for Sempron (same one I use on my own A64 2800+), but I couldn't get the Cool'n'Quiet/PowerNow dashboard demo to run (claimed no supported processor), nor could I see any other sign that it was working, like a low processor speed report in System Properties.a mystery...
(ok, so this is a bit off topic, but at least we are still talking about Semprons)
Rand - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
I built a system around a Sempron 2600+ (S754) a few weeks ago, Cool n' Quiet worked fine on the MSI K8T Neo-FSR.Stock VCore is 1.4V, it dropped to 1.0V and 1GHz at minimum.
johnsonx - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
#47 - you may or may not be right that only 1.6Ghz semprons don't have CnQ support, but it isn't because of an 8x multiplier limitation. My A64 2800+ drops to 989Mhz on CnQ (I'm guessing that's actually supposed to be 1.0Ghz, but my mainboard's clock is a touch low). That implies a 5x multiplier. Either way, it's clear a 1.8Ghz CPU can drop to 1.0Ghz, so why can't a 1.6Ghz one do it?It'd be nice if AMD would make this clear somewhere - if CnQ is a desireable feature, then why hide which CPU's have it and which don't?
(actually disabling it on ANY cpu is stupid in the first place, but again, AMD doesn't check with me on what I think is stupid)
Oh, BTW, to answer your other question, CnQ drops my A64 2800+ to 1.0v, and as far as I can recall the Sempron 2600+ runs at 1.4v. I'll look when I setup one of them later today (they're in boxes in the customer's office now).
Visual - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
in regards to CnQ on the semprons - it is available to all semprons except the 1.6GHz models, as they are already at 8x multi by default (and CnQ lowers the multi, but it cant get any lower than 8x)I wanna know if CnQ lowers the voltages and by how much.. and if the 1.6GHz semprons come at the lower voltages by default or they are at 1.4v too... but yeah, this is quite out of the topic here. sorry.
Andyvan - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
I'm curious about the tests in which the Sempron out-performed the Athlon 64 3200. Both were running at the same clock speed, and the Sempron has 1/4 the cache.Is this due to SSE3 support?
-- Andyvan
Jep4444 - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
the XP 3200+ has been discontinued for quite some time but the A64 2800+ is still in production hence why its a better comparisonRav3n - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
I would like to have seen a comparison with the Athlon XP 3200+ as well... even though that is just adding yet an additional platform.