AMD Phenom Preview: Barcelona Desktop Benchmarks
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 10, 2007 12:03 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
K8 vs. Barcelona: The Phenom Preview
With the test methodology explained, how does Barcelona stack up to a pair of dual-core Opterons? In other words, how much faster can we expect Phenom to be vs. the Athlon 64 X2? To put it succinctly, it looks like around 15% clock for clock:
Clock for clock there's nothing short of a huge increase in performance over the K8 based Opterons in SYSMark 2007. The E-Learning and Video Creation tests are both around the 20% mark, while 3D rendering drops to a 12% advantage, but the productivity suite sees almost a 30% increase in performance thanks to Barcelona. The overall improvement in SYSMark 2007 ends up being 15%.
In fact, the average performance improvement of Barcelona over K8 ends up being 11.5% and 14.3% if we exclude the two 1.8% outliers in our data.
Johan's article showed that Barcelona in the enterprise world is competitive, but on the desktop our data indicates that AMD won't be upsetting Intel anytime soon. Even at 2.6GHz, a 15% boost in overall performance won't be enough to dethrone Intel, but with competitive pricing AMD could actually be a real alternative again.
We have no idea how AMD will price Phenom, but as we suspected, it may be the pricing that ends up deciding how competitive Phenom is.
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lopri - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Was thinking the exact same thing. Because the ~20% advantage in games just didn't make sense considering that the gaming benchmark is probably the most single-threaded in nature. If taken as its face value, the performance gain would be huge (which only would grow as the number of core increases).PlasmaBomb - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
CPU-z says the voltage required to achieve 2.5GHz on a Barcelona was 1.52V, what was it set to in the BIOS?Spuke - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
...it looks like AMD will be a great alternative to Intel. The present K8 is already competitive performance-wise with Conroe and the Barcelona core looks to be MUCH quicker than K8. If Penryn is only 5% faster than Conroe, then I foresee Phenom being equal to Penryn. Well, that is unless you believe single digit gains to be LARGE advantages.Hulk - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
"The present K8 is already competitive performance-wise with Conroe..."Huh? Every review I've ever read comparing K8 with Conroe shows Conroe being significantly faster in 9 out of 10 tests at the same clockspeed.
Sunbird - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
And the reviews with P4s and A64 were showing the A64 winning 9 out of 10 at same clockspeeds, the megahertz myth is busted. The only thing that really matters is price to performance and to some overclocking and maybe platform cost and heat...strikeback03 - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Except the post being replied to did not mention price, only performance. In the desktop market Intel currently beats AMD clock for clock and their top parts are clearly faster than AMD top parts. Depending on how much you get your processor for, AMD can be competitive on price per dollar, but on pure performance not so much right now.Spuke - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I said competitive with Intel not "hair on fire" faster than Intel. Two different things. At the framerates these CPU's are getting nowadays, the performance differences are irrelevant at least in gaming and near irrelevant in other benchmarks. Unless you're making money of these systems where every second counts, the differences are truly insignificant. And I won't get into the J6P market.strikeback03 - Tuesday, September 11, 2007 - link
Well, I don't game, so framerates in that sense are rather meaningless to me. On the other hand if I have a couple hundred photos to convert from RAW to TIFF, then open in CS2 and apply some other corrections, the time savings of running on a 3GHz quad-core C2D over a 3GHz AMD solution (1 or two processor) can be significant. I'd imagine those who do video rendering feel the same way.Regs - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
It's really too early to tell. It's what we all expected. They should of been released at 2.6 and scaled up to 3.0+ Ghz. Not 1.8 to 2.5 Ghz.hirschma - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I'd love to know what happens when a Barcelona is inserted into an AMD 4x4 platform. Does it work?