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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mino - Friday, December 1, 2006 - link
If you would bother to read, you would see those IDLE numbers are Without C'n'C.Witch C'n'C the IDLE number is be more like 250W than 380W.
mino - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
Hell, I should REALLY read after myself more thoroughly...JKing76 - Thursday, November 30, 2006 - link
What have you got against pickup trucks?Genx87 - Thursday, November 30, 2006 - link
I think it is safe to say Intel has caught AMD with its pants down this round with their Core 2 Duo line of products. Intels product line is much more compelling and performance\watt is scary good for Intel.Hell Intel's offering must be good, it got me to buy their product for the first time in nearly a decade! ;)
mino - Friday, December 1, 2006 - link
Actually not.AMD has caught Intel pants down in 2003. It took Intel 3!!! years to come back to game.
Those 3 yrs Intel was NOT price competitive.
Intel has just caught up in midle of 2006, this was to be expected and WAS expected by AMD.
AMD is about to catch up to Intel after 1 year..
This 1 year AMD IS price competitive, hence it is still in the game..
The 2008 Intel CSI may catch AMD with pants down. May.
Actually, in 2008 AMD will have some 30-35% marketshare and be so well entrenched in the corporate market that some mild performance(as now) hiccup is not gonna hurt them in any serious manner.
Roy2001 - Thursday, November 30, 2006 - link
If you need quad-core/CPU system, kentsfield is a much better choice, no question asked.sprockkets - Thursday, November 30, 2006 - link
Why is it that just putting the other 2 cores on the same package reduces power consumption so much?Anyhow, yeah, Intel is ahead, though this would be good for servers, not for desktops. Even so, Intel for now is still better.
But, I found for perhaps 90% of all people, an old s754 board with a $45 dollar Sempron works fast enough. I wish Anand would check out the new C7 processor mini ITX boards to see how well it works for so little power consumption.
Furen - Thursday, November 30, 2006 - link
The QX6700 pretty much draws twice as much power as the E6700, the big benefit of going for quad-core in a single system is that you only have one motherboard, harddrive, one set of RAM sticks, one video card, etc. The 4x4 is horribly engineered, I think even 400W at load is too much for two Opterons at 3GHz.mino - Friday, December 1, 2006 - link
Two Opterons DO NOT employ 8000GTX usually ...Two Opterons do have 95W TDP(lower voltage) ... compared to 125W for FXs
Two Opterons are available in 68W TDP ...
Two Opterons are NOT available in 3GHz flavour ....
Two Opterons are twice as expensive ....
Furen - Thursday, November 30, 2006 - link
The 4x4 motherboard, that is...