Benchmarks: AMD's Phenom II
Published: 30 Jan 2009
Power consumption and conclusion
The new AMD quad-core Phenom II's power consumption profile is impressive. In idle mode it draws the least power of all the high-end processors tested. Under full load its consumption is in line with the competition.
Windows Vista 64-bit: watts (shorter bars are better)
Two- or four-core?
In testing high-end quad-core processors, the question that naturally arises is to what extent modern applications capitalise on the additional cores. In other words: when do quad-core chips start to pay their way? With 3D games, the quad-cores offer hardly any advantages over dual-core chips. In fact, in this area the 3.16GHz Core 2 Duo E8500 is often faster than the quad-core processors. The quads’' true strengths start to show in the compression and decompression of files in the 7-Zip test, and in encryption with Truecrypt 6.1a.
The quad-core chips also show that their arithmetic and logic processing gives them a clear edge over the dual-cores when handling video with Adobe Media Encoder CS4 and when rendering with Cinebench.
Against the 3.16GHz Core 2 Duo E8500, the 2.66GHz Core i7 920 registers twice the performance in the Cinebench test. Today's internet applications make much use of JavaScript, and the SunSpider Javascript test shows that the quad-core processors are also faster in this area than the dual-cores. The underlying point is that modern applications are increasingly designed to exploit the abilities of quad-core processors. iTunes alone represents the inglorious exception in the multimedia arena, supporting only two threads under Windows Vista. Under Mac OS X, iTunes fully exploits all four cores.
Conclusion
Although the naming of the Phenom II X4 with the 920 and 940 model numbers echoes Intel's Core i7 naming convention, that's where the similarity with the Nehalem chips ends. The Core i7 supports the processing of eight threads simultaneously. In many tests the Intel chips demonstrate this advantage fully, and even in benchmarks where the Nehalem architecture is not fully exploited, the 2.66GHz Core i7 920 outperforms the 3GHz Phenom II. In the whole set of ZDNet benchmarks, the only test where the Phenom II delivers a slightly higher score than the Core i7 920 is Truecrypt 6.1a. Even here there's a caveat. For the purposes of this test, the Core i7's automatic overclocking, or turbo mode, was deactivated. If it was turned on, the chip's performance would have improved by several percentage points. Although the Core i7 920 has a nominal clock speed of 2.66GHz, in practice it runs at 2.83GHz.
The Core i7's performance may be in another league, but then so is its cost. At about €250, the chip itself is not much more expensive than the Phenom II X4 940 — but you must add to that cost the price of acquiring a significantly more expensive motherboard. The price structure for the new AMD chips will therefore be decisive in determining their success.
In AMD's Reviewer's Guide, the Phenom II processors are described as direct competitors to the quad-core Q9400 and Q9200 models. That positioning is clearly more realistic than the Phenom naming convention, which might suggest that the Core i7 is the real competition. The benchmarks suggest that even the 2.83GHz Core 2 Quad 9550 is competitive with the 3GHz Phenom II X4 940, although not in image handling (as demonstrated by the Jalbum, Autopano pro and Paint .NET tests).
AMD plans to deliver Phenom II processors with support for DDR3 RAM this spring. However, even this development is unlikely to significantly change the performance picture.
Translation by Toby Wolpe
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