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AMD Launches Budget Processor Refresh
MojoKid writes "AMD has again launched a bevy of new processors targeted squarely at budget-conscious consumers. Though Intel may be leading the market handily in the high-performance arena, AMD still provides a competitive offering from a price/performance perspective for the mainstream. HotHardware has a performance quick-take of the new 3.2GHz Phenom II X2 555 and 2.9GHz Athlon II X4 635. For $100 or less, bang for the buck with AMD is still relatively high."
I agree, I have a Phenom x2 and my whole system cost me a mere €300, - including sound, HDD and good enough video to have a 3d gnome desktop.
i know we're not to rtfa, but you're off by ~100w
for both phenom ii processors in the review
which are 80w and 95w.
Would you please elaborate on the "poor performance". What are/were you doing? Gaming, video encoding, or what? I have a 64-bit X2 dual in a system I built for $300. The only reason I considered a 64-bit processor was so I could stick 4gb of RAM into it, so please further elaborate on how "they burned (you) with their 64 bit processors". What additional benefit were you expecting from 64-bit architecture? I've used this machine for some CPU-heavy statistical/programming work (Natural Language Processing), and it performed adequately. It even handles high-detail Civ4 games well, despite using only onboard video.
The Atom is FAR inferior in terms of performance, so to answer your question, no. The Atom is designed for mobile computing, so it sacrifices performance for power-saving gains. This is meant to compete with intels low priced desktop-orientated CPUs.
hurr durr imma retard
What are you talking about? AMD64, also known as x86_64 or EMT64T was invented by AMD.
The performance is absolutely stellar.
AMD did this so well, Intel decided to try to copy them, and came up with Intel 64T.
As a whole, there is barely a noticeable performance difference between the two platforms.
Of course there are some low-performing 64-bit procs for budget users, just like there are slow Intel procs for budget users.
But overall, Intel 64-bit procs are no better than AMD 64-bit procs.
Also, when it comes to hardware virtualization and IOMMU, AMD has a very significant edge.
Don't blame AMD because you bought the wrong proc model for your system, or misconfig'ed it. Processor is definitely not the only thing that impacts performance. There are many other ways you can screw your system's performance in picking hardware components -- not all procs are ideal for all configurations.
Hell, i'm very often getting better performance with Linux and Windows (dual boot) out of my AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Windsor 2.6GHz than with my Intel Core2 Quad Core Q9400 2.66Ghz, and much better benchmarks for certain types of workloads.
Even though the Quad Core machine has 8gb of RAM, and my dual-core machine only has 4gb...
I blame it on the Linux and Windows kernels' poor support for multi-processing and seedy memory management.
Intel processors in lower-end price brackets might often score a win, but only if you consider the price of CPU alone. Intel GFX is crappy. There's Nvidia integrated GFX available...but for some reason the motherboards with them are usually quite a bit more expensive than AMD ones. Cheap AMD CPU with cheap integrated GFX offers best all-around performance - as good as any other setup for "daily" tasks, definatelly more 3D oomph than comparatively priced alternatives.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Um, of course you are entitles to your opinion. However, if you want to air your opinion in the public square and are not willing to share any details to back it up, you're no better then the crazy dude on the corner talking about the faeries that visit him at night..
From one who modded you down, I did so for the following reasons:
/. is to be a meaningful, intelligent, mature discussion of a particular article, and
1. Screaming and yelling at a poster for being a idiot because they do not agree with you,
2. Failing to recognize that the commenting system on
3. Not understanding that capitalization of words is to be done in accordance with proper rules of grammer, and not as a means to yelling louder over your percieved persecution.
Thank you, the AC who burned 3 mod points on one poster in one article. Posting as AC, obviously, to preserve my moderation.
You were modded down because your comment provided no useful information for Slashdot readers.
As far as I'm concerned, you said AMD CPUs were "garbage" while refusing to back up these claims with supporting evidence. I and a lot of others visitors know from personal experience that AMD products aren't garbage. If you're going to make this claim, you'd better back it up with meaningful performance metrics.
And by that I mean
The moderators read your comment which , IN THEIR OPINION, underperformed.
You know, 1 core, 2 cores, 3 cores, 1,000000 cores I have realize means exactly jack if the data they need to crunch is still sitting on frigen hard drive.
My processors and I would do flips and flops, if we could just get some dam data off our drives. Come on? We have basically not had a real leap in hardrive speeds or technology in how many years?
I mean solid states and all are great, but they still have a long way to go. What happens when we need to start pushing terabytes like megabytes?
We got a ram and catch arms race going on because, the hard drives suck and no one seems to be doing anything about it.
The best we can do are raid tricks to get any more performance (or reliability for that matter), and that has well known limits and problems.
Living in Chile
Well if all you can come up with is variations of "IT SUX!" then don't be surprised if most of us out here think you are full of shit, okay?
After building a couple of budget AMD boxes for customers this lifelong Intel+Nvidia man couldn't be happier when he switched. For less than $750 after rebate I got a 925 Quad with 8Mb of total cache, 8Gb of DDR2 800MHz RAM, a nice 780V board that supports up to 32Gb, 1Tb of HDD, a 4650HD 1Gb, and dual DVD burners along with Windows 7 HP X64. And you know what? I could NOT be happier! This bitch chews through video transcoding like nothing, World in Conflict, Bioshock, HL2, Far Cry 2, all play nice and pretty with nary a slowdown, Windows 7 plays really nice with the new AMD quads and my boot and shutdown times are lightning quick, the quad is only 95watts and doesn't turn my apartment into a space heater, in fact it rarely gets over 105f and that is under full load for hours with stock cooling, under normal use it sits right at 83f, yeah this baby is nice and didn't break my wallet.
So I don't know what your problem with AMD chips was/is, especially since you won't actually bother to elaborate other than "IT SUX!" but I can say my customers can't be happier with the new AMD line. The bang for the buck is incredible, with $50 duals, $70 triples, and $99 quads, the new IGPs support just about every format for hardware acceleration out of the box so video is nice and smooth no matter how big a monitor they buy, much lower heat and power usage which helps keep the electric bills down, motherboards for AMD are less expensive for really good boards, all around it is just a really good buy.
So unless you are one of those that just has to have the largest ePeen, which in that case you shouldn't have been looking at anything less than a $1000 Core I7 chip anyway, I just don't see what the problem could be. I could add an AMD 5xxx to my PC and play any game I want with out a problem, and for a PC that cost less than $750 that is saying a lot. I could easily see myself still using this machine 5 years from now simply because it has room to grow if I need to, but frankly everything I have thrown at the 925 has just gone off without a hitch, so I really don't see the need for any bigger. And many of my customers are "Joe Average" and are quite happy with their new AMD duals and Triples, and just rave to their friends about "how fast" everything is and how nice it all runs.
Lets be honest here-for most folks PCs passed "good enough" quite a few miles back and with $99 quads anybody can have ludicrous speed at their fingertips. Even my 67 year old dad is running AMD quad right now, and couldn't be happier. While he didn't really need all that power I figured at that price it was better to give him room to grow, and with this he can watch videos and chat and do whatever he wants and never even hit the chips hard. All that for a PC that cost less than $600 after rebate. Man you just can't beat that!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Again this silly fight between AMD vs Intel.
When people are going to learn performance _depends_ on what you're going to process?
I remember, few years ago, having a server we had with an Athlon XP 2600 (its real clock was 2.1GHz AFAIR). A perfectly speedy machine for desktop usage, but as a server (pure CPU-load in that case, no I/O bottleneck) it was having a real hard time. We eventually replaced that machine and old 4x Xeon (P3-based, 500MHz), and things went to normal.
I already suspected what the problem could be, so I've decided to make a test replacing - temporarily - the Xeon-based server with a Sun Ultra 30 (1xUltrasparc II @ 300MHz).
Well, the Sparc not only survived the test, but also kicked hard the Athlon's ass. Still, as a desktop machine, the Sparc was mediocre.
The difference was that the Sparc had 2MB L2 cache, while the Athlon had only 256kB (even with 2x bandwidth and lower-latency RAM). In _that_ case the L2 cache made all the difference. Per MHz, the Sparc also won, by large margin, the Xeon machine (1MB L2 for each processor).
Athlon's (pre-64) performance compared to P4 (sorry, I don't have an i7 to compare against a X4) varies. For desktop usage the Athlons felt snappier in general, but with some performance "hiccups" when you started to tax the machine more. The P4s felt slower overall, but the performance seemed to be more homogeneous.
Which one was better then? Well, that's a good question. I personally preferred the "slower but smoother" P4, but Athlons were fine and I could recommend both processors for home usage,
You know what really, really suck?
Those benchmarks they publish around.
I mean "XYZ fps in Crysis"? mp3 lame encoding time? Synthetic benchmarks?
Those say nothing to me. Run some database benchmark, or measure the time it takes to compile the Linux kernel using all cores at once... Or move GBs of data in the memory N times etc. Then it might be interesting.