AMD Phenom Preview: Barcelona Desktop Benchmarks

The Methodology

We've been asking AMD for months now to let us benchmark Barcelona and Phenom, and for months we've gotten the same answer: not yet. When asked why, AMD would always give us some terrible lie about how it was for competitive reasons, but when we actually put our hands on Barcelona at Computex we realized that these chips were simply not ready.

The Barcelona launch is finally upon us and we've got to wait another 45 - 60 days before we'll be able to bring you a review of Phenom, well, not exactly. Back when the Opteron launched, AMD was in a very similar situation to the one it's in today; AMD needed K8 to remain competitive, and it had been delayed so much that we were beginning to wonder if AMD would ever get the chip out on time. When the K8 finally launched, it was server-only but we took one of those server-only motherboards and ran a bunch of desktop tests on it to predict forthcoming performance.

We cracked open the Barcelona server and made some modifications; while the on-board ATI ES1000 graphics is sufficient for use as a server, it'd be too limiting for our desktop benchmarks. Luckily the Supermicro motherboard in the system had a plethora of PCIe slots, we just needed to gain access to them.

The PCIe Riser we removed from the system

We pulled out the PCIe riser card which plugs into the motherboard's sole x16 slot and divides it into a pair of x8s, then we modified a GeForce 8800 GTX by removing the backplate cover so we could just stick it into the open server.

The modded 8800

The 8800 GTX installed, the server is not really intended to be used like this

The end result was, as Johan put it, us using "such a beautiful, noble machine for such plebian activities". We couldn't help it, while AMD has already contacted us about Phenom briefings, we couldn't wait that long to get an idea of what we can expect from AMD on the desktop.

We needed an external PSU to power the graphics card, the server didn't have any PCIe power connectors

Barcelona is currently limited to DDR2-667, we were unsuccessful with attempts to run the memory any faster. Like all other MP Opterons, Barcelona requires the use of registered DDR2 memory, which is inherently slower than the unbuffered stuff we use on desktops. Because of these limitations we refrained from running any comparative benchmarks to desktop Athlon 64 X2s, instead we chose to run a single quad-core Opteron in our server platform against a pair of dual-core Opterons to simulate Phenom vs. K8 on the desktop.

The Opteron server, 2 CPUs, 8 DDR2-667 DIMMs

Keep this in mind as you're looking at these results, at best all we're offering is an idea of, at a minimum, how much faster Phenom will be over an identically clocked Athlon 64 X2. As Phenom is a more data hungry CPU than its predecessor, it will rely more on having a faster memory subsystem so the performance improvement could be even greater when we measure it on the desktop. That being said, at least we can set expectations within some amount of reason by performing this investigation.