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Three Budget CPUs Tested
Steve writes "HEXUS.net are taking a look at three 'value' CPUs. The Sempron 2800+ and 3100+ from AMD (Socket A and Socket 754 respectively.) The price range of the three is fairly broad, the 3100+ coming out on top, also costing the most. Also, for those of you who enjoy cheap thrills, some overclocking has been thrown in, too." (The third chip reviewed is the Celeron D.)
Insightful, more than funny. Just take a look at the street prices for these processors, and compare to Athlons... You'll find the faster Athlons are cheaper in the same mhz rating. Add in double the cache on Athlon, and you'd have to be an idiot to buy a "budget" cpu.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
..to their more comfortable print version.
I recently bought a PC from Compaq for only $445 including free s&h and it has a a Sempron 2800. I got it as a replacement for my AthlonXP 2400+ box which had its motherboard die, and I needed a drop in replacement for my CS classes to run Linux on and the PC works like a charm. It's fast, it runs SuSE 9.1 well and was dirt cheap compared to the Intel alternative.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
You might be able to get some info here.
Sempron = new name for the 32 bit AthlonXP.
Athlon = `new' name for the 64 bit Athlon64.
Basically, Sempron isn't very different from the AthlonXP that we're used to (and in many cases. they're identical.) And now they'll reserve the Athlon name for the 64 bit versions. Unless I've misunderstood something ...
Not really, the Opteron core is better than the Athlon core. If you exclude the 64-bitness, you've still got:
1. SSE2.
2. On-board memory controller.
3. Higher IPC vs the Athlon.
4. Hyper-transport.
Remember, the Opteron is the next-gen core so it is a lot better anyway. Removing the 64-bit part is only one part, the rest is still excellent.
Of course, not as if Windows even has a 64-bit OS yet which is what matters for a lot of people (not me tho).
Well, this spoils the joke, but a word-for-word translation from Latin goes something like: "Always where under where." Think about it.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
Semper ubi Sub ubi -
Semper is Latin for "always",
Sub is Latin for "under",
and ubi is Latin for "Where".
That should help.
I would guess that the grandparent was refering to Intel's statement about the Pentium Floating Point Division Bug; only those who really needed to divide floating point numbers with precision would get get a replacement processor...
The sempron (does it fill your hdd with pr0n?) is (according to my wholesaler)the replacement for the durons.
A sempron 2400+ runs at the same clock rate as an Athlon 2000+ (1667) but can be changed to 2000 to be the same as Athlon 2400+ On chip cache is the same (256) and they seem to run almost the same speed. They were even the same price when they came out for me about a month ago.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
It's cheaper to have your fabs only have to worry about one core.
Not surprising that they got slashdotted when we all start sending such looooong URLs. :) OK, here are Google mirrors:
: www.hexus.net/content/news/news_archive_month.php% 3FdXJsX2FyY2hpdmVfbW9udGg9YXJjNi0yMDA0LnR4dA%3D%3D +AMD+Sempron+2800%2B+,+Sempron+3100%2B+and+Intel+C eleron+D+335+site:hexus.net&hl=en
: www.hexus.net/content/news/news_archive_month.php% 3FdXJsX2FyY2hpdmVfbW9udGg9YXJjNy0yMDA0LnR4dA%3D%3D +AMD+Sempron+2800%2B+,+Sempron+3100%2B+and+Intel+C eleron+D+335+site:hexus.net&hl=en
/ reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD04Mjc=
/ reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD04MjcmdXJsX3B hZ2U9MTA=
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:3rQXlWPbCtwJ
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:onXCbx6BBR4J
http://freecache.org/http://www.hexus.net/content
http://freecache.org/http://www.hexus.net/content
1. That's something that could have been added to an AthlonXP, it's utilising the existing FP pathways just as SSE1 does on the AthlonXP whilst the Tbird athlon didn't have SSE at all.
2. That's the big DING DING DING, the lower memory latency plumbed into what is largely the same architecture makes a hugeass difference.
3. That's due to the on die memory controller more than anything.
Except your simplistic model forgets to include the Sempron 3100+, based off of the Newcastle design. In other words, an a64 derivative :) The review itself includes a Sempron based off of the athlonxp and then one from the athlon64 line.
It's simply Sempron = Budget, Athlon = Performance, Athlon FX = Flagship performance and price. Currently, no semprons have 64-bit, but I expect once 64bit starts taking off they'll have to put it back in.
I would agree with you on the nForce drivers (*), however, my experece with VIA has been good recently. I have an Athlon64 based system with a Via KT800 chipset that runs linux perfectly. All the chipset drivers (Networking, DMA, CpuFreq, HW-monitoring Graphics etc) are driven by open source drivers that are part of the standard 2.6 Linux kernel, without any closed source or non-standard patches.
Having said that, It is running in 32 bit mode, rather than 64.
On the other hand, IMHO, the situation is getting worse with intel chipsets. From what I could tell when I was making a buying decison, there are no open source drivers for their recent integrated graphics, so if you want to use it, you are stuck with either:
1. Stock Redhat, nothing non-standard allowed.
2. Alien (or suchlike) & A weekend trying to get everying working correctly. (And a tainted kernel)
3. Crappy VESA graphics with hardly any acceleration and no 3D.
* Though the situation is getting a lot better, now that reverse engeneered drivers are making it into the 2.6 series Kernels.
Sempron = new name for the 32 bit AthlonXP.
The Athlon XPs with the Barton core have 512k L2, while the Semprons have 256k.
Nobody seems to have mentioned that the socket A Semprons are in fact not related to the Athlon 64 at all, and they are not a development of current Athlon XP cores either; actually, the socket A Sempron is based off of the Thoroughbred core, which is OLDER than the current Barton core. So personally I would recommend snapping up Barton-core XP chips while you still can, rather than buying these new "budget" Semprons.
I just put together a Sempron 3100+ (i.e. A64 core) system for a mate. As an indication of it's use, it has a 9600XT - so "mid-level" gaming - Neverwinter Nights, Doom 3 on reasonable quality levels.
I was impressed by the performance. But I was blown away by the temperatures. After pushing it though 3DMark 2001 and Aquamark (12301 and 29381 respectively - highest score on any of our machines) it was running at 43 celsius. Ambient at the time was about 30 celsius. And this was in a system so quiet that I couldn't hear a damn thing, even with my ear right near the box (Antec).
The new core is *much* better than the Athlon XP core.
Of course, the contributor didn't mention the Intel chip at all, that was thrown in by the editor.
Is the Athlon XP-M 2500/2600. Unlocked multipliers, hand-picked cores, and cheap to boot. You're pretty much guaranteed that one will hit 2.3 GHz, and with good air cooling, 2.5 GHz is even possible.
What's better, because of the unlocked multiplier, you can throw fast memory on the board, and overclock the memory/FSB as far as the motherboard will go, *then* turn the clock speed up. I'll bet that one of those would have beaten the entire lot that they tested.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
There were stories at The Register/The Inquirer a couple weeks ago indicating that AMD would be shifting production to its AMD64/Sempron products and slowing production of the AXP's. Less production with little change in demand => price hikes.
Doing some simple calculations on the data shows that the Sempron 3100+ and the P4 2.8E have equivalent performance, yet the Sempron 3100+ is $50 less then the P4 2.8E. Also, because the Sempron 3100+ uses the socket 754 spec you can swap it with a Athlon 64 when they come down in price.
The Numbers:
Chip: Composite Score: Avg. Price:
Athlon 64 3400 14376.89 $277.05
P4 2.8E 12232.21 $175.61
Sempron 3100 12077.85 $124.00
Cel. D 335 10411.69 $107.50
Sempron 2800 9882.14 $107.25