AMD's Quad FX: Technically Quad Core
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 30, 2006 1:16 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Four cores, 1 Socket or Four cores, 2 Sockets?
One of the major arguments in favor of AMD's Quad FX architecture is the fact that you should get better performance scaling when going from 2 to 4 cores since there's no FSB limiting the data coming in to the CPUs. We looked at the performance scaling from a single FX-74 to two FX-74 processors in our Quad FX platform and compared it to Intel's Core 2 running at 2.66GHz with two and four cores enabled.
| Benchmark | AMD Scaling (2 to 4 cores) | Intel Scaling (2 to 4 cores) |
| 3dsmax 8 | 64.7% | 77.0% |
| Cinebench | 75.6% | 70.8% |
| DivX 6.4 | 29.5% | 35.0% |
| WME9 | 53.2% | 54.8% |
| Blu-ray + Cinebench | 147% | 135% |
| Blu-ray + DivX | 43.9% | 48.3% |
| Blu-ray + WME | 65.4% | 73.4% |
| Blu-ray + 3dsmax 8 | 63.1% | 77.0% |
| Valve Particle Systems | 48.8% | 93.1% |
| Valve Map Compilation | 42.0% | 44.3% |
Even when we take into account our heavy multitasking Blu-ray playback scenarios (which we will describe later), AMD's Quad FX doesn't scale any better than Intel's quad-core solution. All things being equal, AMD should have better scaling, however AMD's cores are inherently slower in most of these benchmarks and thus simply adding more of them is not going to make up for the deficit seen by one.
AMD will have better scaling on paper, but Intel has the superior micro-architecture today, which results in better performance and in most cases, better scaling than AMD. The same might not be true in the enterprise market, but we'll have to save that for a look at Opteron vs. Xeon.
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JarredWalton - Friday, December 1, 2006 - link
Yay for speech recognition!indigenous = enthusiast
we are see = we are seeing
Scratch a couple "basically" from the last paragraph.
yyrkoon - Friday, December 1, 2006 - link
I though Gary was the "one" with the Texas "Twang" ;)laok - Thursday, November 30, 2006 - link
The current 4x4 does not look to be a mature system to me. Wait until 65nm 4x4 comes out and hopefully a better chipset will be available at that time. 65W x 2 is reasonable, 130W x2 is kinda too much.And I also want to know how 4x4 compares to dual dual-core opteron with the same frequence: performance, power consumption etc.
DigitalFreak - Thursday, November 30, 2006 - link
It's the same chip as the Opteron, with the memory controller changed to work with unbuffered memory.JarredWalton - Friday, December 1, 2006 - link
The first word of his subject is the best advice: WAIT! Even if the future might get better, does anyone want to spend $1000+ on what may or may not turn out to be the better platform? When the new CPUs are available, then we can evaluate and decide. Of course, once AMD launches their quad core processors, I'm almost certain that our advice will be that most people only need a single socket motherboard and CPU anyway -- if that. Many people still get by a single core CPU, and the number of people that actually need more than dual CPUs is very small, at least in the desktop workspace.DigitalFreak - Thursday, November 30, 2006 - link
This is the best AMD can do against Kentsfield? They get stomped on in every benchmark, cost more, and draw nearly twice as much power. No one in their right mind would buy this over a Core2Quad. Whomever came up with this product should be fired.The last time I laughed this hard at a CPU/platform launch was when Intel rolled out the P4 dual core CPUs, and at least they came out on time in some of the multimedia benchmarks.
For the record, my current system is running an Opteron 165, so I ain't no Intel fanboy.
photoguy99 - Friday, December 1, 2006 - link
You're right it's actually embarrasing isn't it?If AMD's next-gen architecture improves performance by 30% at same clock, which is huge, they still won't take the lead.
And it seems Intel is done sitting on their hands, they are working like hell to dominate again by the time K8L ramps up big.
People hate hearing this but think it's over for AMD.
And like you, for the record, my current system is an FX-60 so I'm also no Intel fanboy.
DigitalFreak - Thursday, November 30, 2006 - link
...came out on top...photoguy99 - Thursday, November 30, 2006 - link
Seriously, I'd like to know who is selling them...Furen - Thursday, November 30, 2006 - link
That such a badly engineered product was rushed out to reviewers just to have a paper launch. Did AMD believe that no one would make a big deal about the power draw? Or maybe it expected no one to even look at power draw. I was actually impressed by what AMD had accomplished with 4x4, after all, the 3.0GHz Quad FX parts were close to the QX6700, until I saw the insane power draw. Two loaded FX-62 systems (whole systems, mind you) draw about the same power as 4x4 does IDLE!