AMD's Athlon II X3 435 & New Energy Efficient CPUs: Killing Intel Below $90
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 20, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
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:
Compared to the Intel dual-core options, the Athlon II X3 435 is a definite winner here. It's got the core count and clock speed to beat the old Penryn derivatives. Its biggest competition comes from its own family, the Athlon II X4 620 is the better buy here.
Cinebench R10
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.
As I've been mentioning this entire time, the Athlon II X3 435 doesn't really sacrifice clock speed in its three-core configuration. At 2.9GHz even its single threaded performance is comparable to the Pentium E6300. Run a multithreaded app however and the performance goes from parity to leading:
POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
The POV-Ray results echo what we've been seeing thus far, vs. Intel there's no contest - the 435 is the better value. Compared to the quad-core Athlon IIs however, the 435 isn't very good.
Blender 2.48a
Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.
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maddoctor - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
It's funny, AMD will never get any profit and still loss after 3 years consecutively. I belive you can not buy any AMD product when Intel roll out the Larrabee. I believe Intel will win in this market too and will crush NVIDIA like AMD before. Intel will own all and everyone will be happy both customers and the consumer.SmilingBuddha - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
You missed Econ101.Griswold - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I *know* that you are clueless.zipzoomflyhigh - Friday, October 23, 2009 - link
Yeah well they had to absorb 5 million to buy ATI.So everyone would be happy if Intel owned everything huh? Would anyone here be happy paying $1000+ for a cpu? I think not. You are clueless. AMD will return to profitability next year and will completely own the GPU market by then. Without AMD, no Intel fanboy would be happy period.
theonejrs - Thursday, October 22, 2009 - link
No offense, but you don't know what you are talking about! AMD currently owns 31.5% of the CPU market to Intel's 68.5%. That's better than a 5% increase in the last year alone! Rumors have it that nVidia is canceling some of it's higher end video cards because they can't compete with Ati in the high end market, so Ati's market will grow even more, which means even more profits for AMD!http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/10/06/nvidia-kill...">http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/10/06/...x260-aba...
The article also claims that nVidia may even abandon the high end cards altogether!
Intel is in the awkward position of having the best computer, but almost no one can afford it, so the original i7 is relegated to the server market. They also have to maintain production of faster CPUs than AMD makes! AMD has two low priced Quad cores, the Athlon IIx4 620 and 630. $99 and $122 respectively. The 620 will overclock about 800MHz, while the 630, over 1GHz, both on air! From a price/performance point of view, AMD wins hands down! AMD has invested heavily in the low to mid price market, and have a wide variety of CPUs to cover any need. I would say they have planned well, and should be in a very good sales position during the continuing recession!
I would also like to point out that AMD hasn't made a major mistake in well over a year. Products have come out when they were supposed to, and there haven't been any real glitches in any of the new CPUs. They've also continued to refine these new CPUs to the point that the Phenom IIx4 Deneb 940 overclocks better and is a better all around CPU today, than it was when it was first introduced!
And for the best business deal of the new century, hands down! AMD sold their entire multi-billion dollar debt by selling their Chip Fabs, while still maintaining operation and control of them! I don't think these guys are about to fold their tent quite yet! I believe they are a lot smarter than you think!
Respectfully,
theonejrs
coldpower27 - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
This is FUD, currently Intel owns 80 something percent marketshare as opposed to AMD's 11.5%. Were discussing CPU's not GPUs.http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/In...">http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-N...e-Lead-O...
Discrete and Integrated GPU marketshare is seperate, there are 3 competitors there, Intel, AMD/ATi, nVidia.
Overclocking is only relevant to the budget enthusiast and that represents a small section of the market. What matters is stock performance not overclocking.
AMD wins price/performance, but they lose on brand image, and that is more important as that allows Intel to sell processors at the same performance for a higher premium and garner more profits.
It's about time that AMD hasn't tripped on it's 2 feet, as if they had continued to do so, Intel wouldn't see them as worthy of making any price adjustments over.
No AMD will not be going anywhere soon, we still need them, we all need AMD to continue to exist for different reasons.
medi01 - Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - link
I hope you were joking about satisfied customers. Intel will again simply "own" its customers, as it did years before, when it felt no competition.andrewaggb - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
Larrabee is a big unknown. I suspect it won't be as good as anybody hopes and initially drivers will suck. My guess is larrabee version 2 will be much better but probably still suck compared to equivalent amd/nvidia, and maybe version 3 (in like 5 years) will be competitive. And that's if intel doesn't just give up again like they have every other time they say they will make good graphics. The barrier to entry into the graphics market is huge now, it's not simple to design a dx11 gpu core that works (just ask nvidia) let alone one that is fast. And then drivers are a constant work in progress. I don't believe a new player can come along and get it all right their first try.Zingam - Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - link
That's why Intel actually does not imply they are making a GPU but rather a processor with GPU capabilities. Interestingly enough NVIDIA also backs off the notion GPU. I guess the only pure next generation GPUs will be ATI. What is going to come after that - nobody like us knows yet.rhorwitz - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
Oh you are so terribly mistaken! Without any competition Intel would raise its prices so high that only the rich could afford a PC. If it were not for AMD (or any other competitor) we would still be using first generation pentiums costing $500 ea. To make an assinine statement that "...everyone will be happy both customers and the consumer." is pure unmitigated BS.Rick