Some Background
We’ve had a lot of coverage in the processor segment, mostly dealing with the latest products, but we also did a lot of analysis to compare power consumption and analyze the advances of AMD’s and Intel’s products when they introduce new steppings. (A stepping is an internal revision of a processor to fix known issues and slightly polish performance.) We checked how well processors scale with additional cores, looked at performance differences among various processor architectures running at the same clock speed, differences in various L2 cache sizes, and efficiency improvements over the years.
Highly Recommended Analysis Articles
The Truth about PC Power Consumption Idle and peak power only tell half of the story: in this article, we look at the total power consumption of AMD and Intel systems by examining the total power used for a given workload, which is the only way to properly measure power efficiency.
The Tale of Wolfdale: Power Requirements and Overclocking Analyzed Intel’s 45 nm Core 2 Duo E8000 is not only faster than the 65 nm E6000 series, it is also more efficient. We tracked the power consumed for a given workload and analyzed efficiency in depth, using different Intel processors running at 3.0 GHz.
AMD’s Athlon Stepping Improvements Improved processor steppings introduce improvements during a processor life cycle. We looked at three different Athlon 64 X2 5000+ processors using the F2, F3, G1 and G2 steppings, to determine the advances achieved in the move from 90 nm to 65 nm manufacturing.
GPU vs. CPU Upgrade: Extensive Tests What brings better results: purchasing a faster graphics card, or investing your cash in a more powerful processor?
Does Cache Size Really Boost Performance? We compared 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo processors using 1 MB, 2 MB and 4 MB L2 cache to find out what difference cache size makes.
AMD CPU Efficiency Compared We took various AMD processors (Phenom, Athlon X2, Athlon 64 X2 and Sempron) running at the same clock speeds and analyzed their efficiency. Which one provides the best performance per watt ratio?
Intel Power Consumption Then and Now This article is similar to the AMD CPU efficiency story, but we looked at the Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo, Pentium D and Pentium 4 to see how efficiency improved when using a given workload and tracking power consumption in Watt-hours.
Phenom vs. Athlon Core Scaling Compared Since we wanted to know just about how good the Phenom really is, we looked at the Athlon 64 X2 and Phenom X4, running each chip with only a single core, and going all the way up to all available cores to see how well the Phenom’s Stars architecture scales.
Overclocking: Dual vs. Quad Core CPUs
What if Your CPU Cooler Fails? In earlier times, CPUs uses to die when they overheated, but that’s not always the case with modern AMD and Intel CPUs.
The Gigahertz Battle: How Do Today’s CPUs Stack Up? We compared various AMD and Intel processors, running them all at 2.4 GHz to check the performance levels of the various architectures.
Processor Performance Comparison
Please have a look at our CPU Performance Charts to get detailed performance data on as many as 102 different processors, from today’s Core 2 Duo/Quad and Phenom X3/X4, to the Athlon 64 X2 and Pentium D, and all the way down to first-generation Athlons, Semprons and Pentium 4 processors.
"The Mainconcept 1.5.1 benchmark converts MPEG2 FullHD video into the H.264 format. Although the benchmark scales well with as many as eight cores—we used an Intel Skulltrail system to try this—the 2.0 GHz quad core isn’t enough to beat Intel’s 3.16 GHz dual core."
According to the graph you show us, it is...
Do you even have an editor anymore? This article is yet another nail in toms coffin. The graphs are wrong (two items on each graph and you still manage to swap them over), the words are wrong (eg 3.16 quad!!!) and worse still the article is pointless.
Here's another apples to oranges for you:
I own a motorbike and a car, both do 40mpg and both cost the same. But wait the car has more seats AND more wheels, its safer in an accident too so it must be better than the bike. oh no did i forget to look at the bikes good points never mind.
And why choose the low power version, you could have used a cheaper high power version and underclocked/undervolted to reduce power OR accept the fact that four cores should use more power than two but seeing as you didn't want to show the quad win anything i guess you can't accept that.
I guess whoever is in charge these days is only concerned with ad revenue not content or integrety
"Supreme Commander shows the same results: it runs much faster on the Intel dual core than it does on AMD’s quad core. Since the performance difference is 80%, the clock speed difference alone isn’t enough to account for the tremendous difference."
Wrong again. According to graph, Phenom is faster than C2D, not the other way around.
This artical is a little to bias to Intel for my liking. When applications that do support 4 cores are tested and unsuprisingly the AMD chip wins, they dont praise it, they just praise the intel chip instead for coming a close 2nd. While all the applications that dont support 4 cores get praise for Intel for winning and not to AMD for coming second.
The whole artical makes no sence about what it does compare.
My conclusion for the artical the E8500 3.16 GHz wins on all single/double core applications but when 4 cores are used the AMD Phenom X4 e9350 2.0 GHz wins. Which is what we should expect anyway.
This article is interesting from the standpoint of software, the main thing I see from this is just how little use applications currently make of extra cores.
Nehalem...sorry Core i7...yes, yes that's much better...will surely have an impact on applications use of multithreading. Or will it? with 'turbo-mode' perhaps there is no need for software to use those extra cores.
Annoyingly left out was the overclocking performance of these two processors. As we know Intel's current chips annihilate the competition in overclockability providing extra Hertz for just a few hours time. These E8500 are easily hitting 4GHz I do tend to wonder if the advantage the AMD had in some tests wouldnt be eliminated when both chips were fully OC'd.
What i was interesting in is,
having the benchmarks run with a current antivirus software "allways on", as it should, at least, be users default configuration.
thanx
Tom's, please replace your eeditor with any small child. I could have seen the mistakes here when I was 9.
Tom's, please replace your eeditor with any small child. I could have seen the mistakes here when I was 9.
However, I did make a typo when making that comment
A fast dual-core is best for games
An energy-efficient quad is good for use as a home/media server
^ I did that without looking at the article. Am I right? Hang on... yep, pretty much.
How'd I manage that? Well, it ain't cuz i'm psychic, that's for sure. It's because WE KNEW ALL THIS ALREADY TOM!
Games are more responsive to raw power and are less heavily threaded - most are threaded for dual-core, but as of yet relatively few can make good use of a massively multicore platform (except well-coded PS3 games, and that's a different subject entirely!). Modern applications, especially graphical, media (encoders!) and file-based (server/AV) are designed to split and combine threads on-the-fly and with Vista in tow really need a quad to crunch them efficiently in the background.
So what was the point of this article again exactly? Telling us what's very common knowledge?
I was hoping u did abit more the real workstation apps. particularly Virtualization. And running on Vista 64 bit.
For applications that are dependent on core speed, the AMD does not do so bad. Let's also remember that the AMD chip is being used in a chipset that offers HD playback and half-decent 3D game support..the same cannot be said for Intel-based chipsests. I would also go with AMD for a cheap, fast server..where the architecture comes into it's own (especially core-to-core and memory performance).
That's because Intel doesn't have a native quad core. It's also the reason why some of the world's fastest super-computers rely on AMD hardware. Intel may have caught up with AMD in the desktop sector (bar chipsets and graphics cards), but the server/cluster/super-computer sectors use AMD for a reason. The people knocking AMD should do well to remember that, perhaps.
you guys are so boring! i hate this website now all you dorks that are into computers need to get a life, play some basketball, and listen to some rock n roll like i am right now! im a seventh grader that is more cool than all of you put together!