AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+: Competing with Aggressive Pricing

Photo Processing Performance

We turned to the Retouch Artists Photoshop Speed Test for measuring CPU performance in Adobe's Photoshop CS3 beta.  The benchmark applies a number of actions to a test image while we measure the total time elapsed during the active portion of the test.  We report results in seconds, with lower scores denoting higher performance. 

We set history states to 1 and cache levels to 4; CS3 was configured to make use of all available system memory. 

Performance under Adobe Photoshop CS3 is not a strong point for the Athlon 64 X2 lineup as even the X2 6000+ can barely outperform the Core 2 Duo E6400.  The rest of the model numbers fall around the speed of Intel's E6300 or slower.  If you're a Photoshop user, AMD won't be able to do it for you.

Our next test is one recommended by Intel, but the test itself appears to be fair as it is a simple task using one of Vista's built in applications: Windows Photo Gallery.  This test simply measures the amount of time required to print four sheets of thumbnails; of course we don't measure actual printing time, rather the benchmark exports the pictures to an Excel spreadsheet.  Time is measured in seconds, with lower times resulting in better performance:

Although vastly different in usage pattern and purpose, the Windows Photo Gallery benchmark actually gave us results very similar to the CS3 benchmark.  We suspect that the nature of these benchmarks tends to favor the notably faster SSE performance of the Core 2 processors, but if that's the case we may see the tables turn once AMD introduces Barcelona.

Finally we have a benchmark that was one of the first tests AMD sent around a while back to showcase what 64-bit processors could do for performance.  The application is called the Panorama Factory and it is used to stitch together multiple digital pictures in order to make one larger picture, or a panorama.  The stitching process can be quite CPU intensive so we used the benchmark to stitch together 10 6MP images of a room and reported the total process time:

Performance is pretty evenly split here between the two processor families.  The E6700 is as fast as the X2 6000+, the E6600 and 5600+ are pretty close as are the E6400 and 5000+.