AMD's dual core Opteron & Athlon 64 X2 - Server/Desktop Performance Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Jason Clark & Ross Whitehead on April 21, 2005 9:25 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
At this point, having seen dual core CPUs from both AMD and Intel, there's no question that dual core is desirable on all fronts; whether we're talking about the server world or on your desktop, dual core improves performance by a noticeable amount and the performance benefits will only get better down the road.As a server solution, the dual core Opterons enable a whole new class of performance to be realized on platforms. Two socket servers will now be capable of having the performance of a 4-way system, something that has never been possible in the past. AMD's push with dual core into the server markets half a year before Intel's dual core Xeon arrives is going to tempt a lot of IT departments out there; the ability to get 4-way server performance at much lower prices is an advantage that can't be beat.
Despite AMD's lead in getting dual core server/workstation CPUs out to market, Intel has very little reason to worry from a market penetration standpoint. We've seen that even with a multi-year performance advantage, it is very tough for AMD to steal any significant business away from Intel, and we expect that the same will continue to be the case with the dual core Opteron. It's unfortunate for AMD that all of their hard work will amount to very little compared to what Intel is able to ship, but that has always been reality when it comes to the AMD/Intel competition.
On the desktop side, we are extremely excited about the Athlon 64 X2. The 4400+ that we compared here today had no problem competing with and outperforming Intel's fastest dual core CPUs in most cases, and at a price of $581, the 4400+ is the more reasonably priced of the X2 CPUs. That being said, we are concerned that availability of the lower cost X2 CPUs will be significantly more limited than the higher priced models. At the ~550 marker, your best bet is clear - the Athlon 64 X2 will be faster than anything that Intel has for the desktop.
What's quite impressive is how competitive the Athlon 64 X2 is across the board. With the Pentium D, we had to give up a noticeable amount of single threaded performance (compared to Intel's top of the line Pentium 4 CPUs) in order to get better multithreaded/multitasking performance, but with AMD, you don't have to make that sacrifice. Everything from gaming to compiling performance on the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ was extremely solid. In multithreaded/multitasking environments, the Athlon 64 X2 is even more impressive; video encoding is no longer an issue on AMD platforms. You no longer have to make a performance decision between great overall performance or great media encoding performance - AMD delivers both with the Athlon 64 X2. Also keep in mind that the performance preview that we gave of the Athlon 64 X2 today is actually a very conservative estimate. The shipping Athlon 64 X2 CPUs will run with regular DDR memory and with much faster motherboards - meaning that you should be prepared to be impressed even further down the road.
The real problem is that AMD has nothing cheaper than $530 that is available in dual core, and this is where Intel wins out. With dual core Pentium D CPUs starting at $241, Intel will be able to bring extremely solid multitasking performance to much lower price points than AMD will. And from what we've seen, it looks like that price advantage will continue for quite some time. It all boils down to economics, and in the sense of manufacturing capacity, Intel has AMD beat - thus allowing for much more aggressively priced volume dual core solutions. Then there's the issue of availability; as impressive as AMD's dual core desktop offerings are, we're honestly worried that we won't see any real volume until late this year at best. Intel does have a golden opportunity now to really step forward and regain some enthusiast marketshare, but we seriously doubt that we'll see anything faster than the Pentium D 3.2 anytime soon. It's strange how tables have turned, making Intel look like the value CPU manufacturer in the dual core race.
Now that we've seen both AMD and Intel dual core solutions, it's time to play the waiting game. Dual core Opteron 8xx series CPUs should be available now, with the 2xx and 1xx series following in about a month. The Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition should be shipping before the end of this month, with expected retail availability next month. And the big wait, of course, will be for the Athlon 64 X2, which will be available towards the end of this year.
Our dual core coverage does not stop here. We have more in the works including the promised Workstation comparison, a look at how multitasking in Linux is impacted by dual core, and even more multitasking scenarios modeled based on your feedback (so, keep it coming).
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Nighteye2 - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Small observation: in the article DDR2 is mention as a solution to AMD memory bandwidth, while in the news posts there's a bit about AMD skipping DDR2...Anyway, that being said, it's looking good...I wonder how long until there'll be sub-300 A64 X2's available? ^_^
Also, about the hardware problems...isn't running a dual-socketed MB with a single CPU asking for trouble?
Spacecomber - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
I really enjoyed taking a look at what you could bring us about these upcoming Athlon dual core processors. It looks like dual core will be the future for all of us, at least at some point.Just a quick comment on the price comparisons that you provided between the dual core opterons and their single core predecessors, I found it interesting to compare prices on the basis of the number of cores.
So,
Opteron 248: 2x$455=$910
Opteron 174: $999
Opteron 848: 4x$873=$3492
Opteron 275: 2x1299=$2598
Assuming the performance scales simply based on the number of cores involved, the pricing of the new dual core opterons looks more attractive.
Space
Quanticles - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
pwntfishbits - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
It's odd that some picture game developers immediately supporting the PhysX chip as soon as it's available, but think they'll drag their feet to take advantage of another whole CPU core at their disposal.Maybe that will be the reality though, as MT programming is supposed to be a lot harder. Still, to be able to get a game out the door that blows away any of the competition, it might happen sooner than we think. And I could see how Intel would want to push this along to help their sales, and might contribute resources towards making it happen. "OMG, that new game is great, but it totally rules on a new dual core rig! Saw it at my friend's house the other day!"
Who knows, maybe games'll gobble up that second core so fast, it won't be long before we complain about how sluggish the system is when multi-tasking, and that we're shutting down background processes, anti-virus, etc all over again. "We need quad core!" :P
Aenslead - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Ah, well... most of you are forgetting something: sure, the chip's cost is almost 50% higher than the cheapest Intel offer, however, to use a Pentium D, you require a new motherboard (i955x @ 180USD, probably... nF4 IE @ 200USD), AND DDR2 memory... plus, if you have an AGP card, the PCIe video card as well. That's about 650USD for the whole Intel upgrade. AMD, on the other side, is just the processor, which ends up being FAR cheaper.And that is all I have to say about that.
Jep4444 - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
the X2 4400+ does not parralel to the 3500+, it parallels to the upcoming socket 939 3700+(which a 939 4000+ could be underclocked to compare)the 3500+ would be best compared to a X2 4200+
the X2 4600+ is dual 3800+ and the 4800+ are dual 4000+
xtknight - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
It's too bad that gamers or people that don't multitask are basically left in the dark (extra-performance-wise) by dual-core. I'm not going to break the bank for something that's going to give me less performance than I already have.There's multitasking and then there's multitasking. One kind is having a main program up that gets most of the CPU's attention and another BitTorrent or whatever that's taking up <5% CPU. Usually I'm not trying to encode a video while I play a game, which would be the other type of multitasking. Only the second kind would greatly benefit from these new CPUs, which is a shame. In the first multitasking type I talked about, dual core will improve responsiveness but not raw processing performance.
Does this mark the end for single-threaded performance? Programmers will have a hell of a time creating dual core-beneficial applications, unless by nature the program would benefit from it (i.e. a game server browser, or an AI-heavy game). If the PhysX chip comes through, dual-core won't help too much with physics either. The only benefit that would ever see the light of day for me is the fact that the rest of my system isn't lagged while something else is taking up 100% CPU. For example I could still move my mouse and use Windows Explorer while I'm compressing some files with WinRAR. Even then these scanarios don't come up too often for me personally.
When it comes to raw number crunching performance, the dual-core CPUs don't show any improvement over single-core ones. Sadly enough I think it's going to take forever for programmers to multi-thread their applications. That being said, any program I make from now on will be multithreaded as much as possible.
AtaStrumf - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Nice review as usual :-)...but I do have one complaint. I would like to have seen a top of the line Intel single core CPU (there were no single core P4s in your tests) compared to "X2 4400+" and a 3500+ 939 Athlon 64 which runs at the same 2,2 GHz as the "X2 4400+" to see a direct effect of the second core instead of the 2,4 GHz 3800+.
Some multitasking tests were a bit weird, dare I say unrealistic, but OK for starters. The way I multitask is usually a bunch of IE windows (12 ATM), one folding at home client, 3 - 6 bittornado clients, 1 or 2 (sometimes more) word documents, 1 or 2 (sometimes more) excel documents, outlook express, possibly Photoshop CS, a bunch of Windows Explorer windows, few notepads, some winzip/winrars every now and then, windows media player playing MP3s, Kaspersky antivirus, a dictionary, ACDsee from time to time, Opera with a few open tabs if IE isn't right for the job, ... and I rarely play any games anymore. OK I think that's it. This is not at all uncommon for me, so I'm really looking forward to dual cores, I'm just very sorry that AMD can't offer anything at a competitive price, so instead of going for a Socket 939 from a socket 754, I might go for an Intel platform. I don't know jet, a lot depends on how hard those PD are too cool. No word on that yet from you. I wonder why?
morcegovermelho - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
At AMD site:http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma...
Hypertransport Links:
152 - (3 links - 0 coherent links)
252 - (3 links - 1 coherent link)
852 - (3 links - 3 coherent links)
that means they are different. Time to change page 3? ;)
SLIM - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Nice review AT. One small suggestion would be to compare one x75 to two 248s to see the effects of memory bandwidth as well as having two cores communicating directly with each other.BTW, that's pretty damn funny that you have to install new circuit breakers and outlets just to power up the zeons.