AMD Releases Sempron Earlier Than Expected

I_am_Rambi writes "AMD has released the Sempron today, a release date that moved up from Aug 17th. Because of this move, some of the reviews that are out, will be continued later on. Some sites already have reviews including Toms Hardware, Anandtech, and Tech Report. The Sempron, AMDs budget processor, is staged against the Intel Celeron." Jason Jacobs writes with a review on Techware Labs, and Hack Jandy adds a link to a review at HotHardware, writing "it appears as though the Socket A based Sempron performs abysmally while dollar for dollar the Socket 754 version levels every Intel CPU."

Comments

By "performs abysmally"

[eddy]

By "it appears as though the Socket A based Sempron performs abysmally" they probably mean that these $30-40 budget processors are only ~5-8 times faster than as say a "K6-2 400" or equalient "Pentium 2" -- processors which did provide and still provide all the performance you need on a non-gaming/non-dev desktop machine.

"Bah, these $30 chips don't run Doom 3 at Max Extreme Settings. We're so disappointed. They are useless!"

Re:By "performs abysmally"

[Short Circuit]

I was a little disappointed by the HotHardware review...they're stacking AMD's value processor line against older versions of Intel's performance line. That makes sense until you try to compare things that depend on, e.g. processor caches.

Re:By "performs abysmally"

[gl4ss]

it's all about marketing, nothing else.

if you actually bothered to read up a bit.. the first semprons provided are just athlon xp's rebranded and flagged with a performance number that's higher so it can be compared to celerons mhz rating.

this no doubt is because people are just buying by the number on the cpu, a normal consumer doesn't really know anything but the 2.8ghz number on the celly.

Annoyed

[artlu]

I am really annoyed that Intel and AMD market these low end procs. Usually for $10 more you can get a similar speed older processor that performs better. Most consumers do not know the difference and they buy junk HP desktops that I used to have to fix every other week.

GroupShares Inc.

Re:Annoyed

[lachlan76]

But the newer processors are still mass-produced, and I'm fairly sure that you can get a couple of thousand 2.4GHz Celerons/Semprons (equiv clock speed) much more easily than an equivalent speed older processor. When Dell/HP/Compaq want a processor line, that will carry much more weight than individual people. But this doesn't really affect me since I use my computer for games/devel, so I need at least a moderately fast machine.

Re:Annoyed

[MrNemesis]

I can understand your frustration re: the socket A model: Athlon XP's are currently cheap as chips (ha ha) and very good performers for the price, whereas the socket A Sempron is a bit of a disappointment.

But the real meat of the Sempron line is getting a dirt cheap socket 754 CPU out there, to help speed up the transition to the new desktop socket. The 754 Semprons are very good performers for the price (since the Sempron is, IIRC, a redesign of the A64 core you'd expect it to work better on a socket 754 board) *and* come in much cheaper than the current breed of A64's.

Good news for the OEM's (cheap chips to flog to other people with more money than sense) and good for us, cos it'll mean cheaper A64 motherboards :)

IT on slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on slashdot, "IT" is PHB-speak, not geek-speak!

Re:Sempron Fi

[garcia]

Sempron is largely a branding exercise, so the name is important. The Sempron name is intended to evoke phrases like "semper fidelis" and other such tokens of solidity and steadfastness.

It's meant to seperate the processor from the Athlon series which has confused most people. The article states that most people probably don't know (or care to know) that there is a huge difference between the AthlonXP and the Athlon64.

AMD vs Intel

[myte]

I am so happy that AMD is really giving Intel a run for their money. I remember when they had so many problems with their first few processors. Now that their processors are strong and stable they have a lot of 'followers'. Their processors are a great value and definately worth every penny.

I love rooting for the underdog and watching them really become a force in the market. Kudos to AMD and good luck in the future.

That was a lousy benchmark report.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not talking about the results or as to which processor did what. The problem was that they failed to show what they were using in their benchmarks. Telling us that in video encoding this processor took two minutes and the other took two and a half is pretty worthless if you're going to keep it a secret what video you used.
The same problem was repeated on almost every page. I gave up on it about half way through. If you're going to do a ten page benchmarking story, why not share with the readers the details of what kind of test you ran. Even the charts were pretty much bare of details. What's the point of a chart that doesn't even tell you waht is being measured?

Re:Sempron Fi

[rpdillon]

I still have trouble believing that AMD fell into the same trap Intel fell into with Pentium. IMHO, Pentium M should have never been so named: it was new technology and it should have been marketed as such. AMD did the same thing with AthlonXP and Athlon64...a shame, because people *don't* understand the difference at a basic consumer level. I understand that name-brand does have value, but you still want to give the public a good idea (via your naming scheme) when one product breaks away from the others on a technology/performance level. JM2C...

Re:Sempron Fi

[rpdillon]

Umm, just because the competition has a trademark doesn't mean I can't say my processor is compatible with it, even in my advertising. People use trademarked names of their competitors in their advertisments all the time.

As I recall, Cyrix was onto the 586/686 naming scheme and Intel switched to Pentium to distinguish their product.