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AMD Dual-Core Performance Revealed

Posted by Zonk on from the hard-core-number-crunching dept.

Timmus writes "In two separate articles, FiringSquad takes a look at the performance of AMD's dual-core Opteron CPU. The first article examines the performance of dual-core in scientific computing applications (MATLAB and LS-DYNA) as well as digital photography, while the second story focuses on the performance of dual-core Opteron paired against Intel's dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition in video encoding, Cinebench, and a few other applications. The performance improvements are pretty impressive in multi-threaded applications that take advantage of the technology."

5 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. As for gamers (from TFA) by ahsile · · Score: 5, Informative

    Notice the lack of an Athlon 64 FX version of AMDs dual-core strategy. For the time being, its recognized that games are exclusively written for single-threaded operation and as such run better on single-threaded processors at elevated frequencies. Thus, the FX series marches on at 2.6GHz for now. ... so for games, keep to your single core CPU.

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  2. Re:Chance for someone to karma whore... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Less heat, less space, less energy requirements, eventually less money because there is only one chip.

  3. Anandtech article on same subject by bersl2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2397

  4. Re:Chance for someone to karma whore... by hobuddy · · Score: 5, Informative

    1) Cost.
    Since there need only be half as many sockets, the motherboard can be smaller, less complicated, and therefore less expensive. This is especially true in the case of single-socket motherboards, which are usually 50-60% as expensive as their dual-socket brethren. AMD has sweetened the cost savings even further by arranging it so that most single-socket motherboards already in use with a single-core CPU can accomodate a dual-core CPU after just a BIOS flash.

    2) More efficient interconnection between the cores.
    This advantage currently applies to AMD's design but not Intel's. As explained here, "As you can see, AMD didn't simply glue a pair of K8 cores together on a single piece of silicon. They've actually done some integration work at a very basic level, so that the two CPU cores can act together more effectively. Each of the K8 cores has its own, independent L2 cache onboard, but the two cores share a common system request queue. They also share a dual-channel DDR memory controller and a set of HyperTransport links to the outside world."

    After reading the TechReport article I linked to above, it looks to me like AMD is way ahead in the dual core market in all of the areas that count: better backward-compatibility, better cache coherency, and lower heat.

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  5. Anandtech has some cost comparisons/benchmarks by IronChefMorimoto · · Score: 5, Informative

    Anandtech has an AMD dual core Opteron and Athlon64 X2 article that might compliment the original poster's story pretty well. It has a sh*tload of benchmarks:

    http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2397

    I really wish they wouldn't do gaming benchmarks with an Opteron in stories like these. Just because the Opteron used has similar specs to the dekstop processor that hasn't been released doesn't necessarily mean that the gaming benchmarks are all that useful. Just my 2 cents.

    It'll be interesting to see how soon prices fall for these AMD processors (server and desktop) when they go mainstream. Read the cost comparisons for these badboys in the article.

    Finally, I'm glad that Anand decided to demonstrate that the new AMDs will be backwards compatible with Socket 939 motherboards WITH BIOS revisions. Intel's dual core processors don't offer that luxury, from what I read in the article.

    IronChefMorimoto