The Athlon II X2 & Phenom II X2: 45nm Dual-Core from AMD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Intel’s Response: The Pentium E6300
AMD has two new dual-core chips priced at $87 and $102, both run at or around 3.0GHz and have a fair amount of cache. The Athlon II X2 250 has a 1MB L2 per core (2MB total) while the Phenom II X2 550 BE has a large 6MB L3 to share between its two cores. These are both very healthy sounding processors, borderline scary if you’re Intel.
The Pentium E6300
In the blue corner we have the new Pentium E6300. It’s a 45nm monolithic dual-core part, just like the Athlon II X2. It has a 2MB L2 cache also like the Athlon II X2, albeit shared between the two cores which is potentially an upside. Unlike previous Pentium for Desktop (that’s the official name) processors, the E6300 uses a 1066MHz FSB and it supports Intel’s VT. The problem? The E6300 only runs at 2.80GHz; AMD has a clock speed advantage.
In our first Phenom II review I talked about how AMD needs a clock speed advantage to compete. Compared to a large-cache Core 2, that’s very true, but the E6300 doesn’t have a healthy 6MB L2 for two cores. It’s only got 2MB. All of the sudden things aren’t looking so rosy for Intel.
An inherent advantage of Intel’s Core architecture is its 4-issue front end (which in some cases can behave like a 5-issue front end). The problem is feeding such a beast requires very fast memory access. The Pentium E6300 is still based on the same architecture as the Core 2 Duo, meaning it has no on-die memory controller. Rob it of a decent sized cache and its performance suffers. A quick look at Bench shows us that even an extra megabyte of cache helps tremendously:
| Processor | SYSMark 2007 Overall |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 (2.93GHz/3MB L2) | 173 |
| Intel Pentium E6300 (2.80GHz/2MB L2) | 158 |
Note that when Conroe first launched some parts (the Core 2 Duo E6300 funny enough) only had a 2MB L2. The problem is that was nearly three years ago; applications have grown in size and so have their demands from processors. What was acceptable back then is now not. I’d like to see Intel move its 3MB L2 caches down to these sub-$100 price points. But I’ll let the benchmarks decide whether or not it’s necessary.
| Processor | Clock Speed | L2 Cache | TDP | Price |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 | 3.00GHz | 12MB | 95W | $316 |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 | 2.83GHz | 12MB | 95W | $266 |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 | 2.66GHz | 6MB | 95W | $213 |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 | 2.50GHz | 6MB | 95W | $213 |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 | 2.66GHz | 4MB | 95W | $183 |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 | 2.50GHz | 4MB | 95W | $183 |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 | 2.33GHz | 4MB | 95W | $163 |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 | 3.33GHz | 6MB | 65W | $266 |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 | 3.16GHz | 6MB | 65W | $183 |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 | 3.00GHz | 6MB | 65W | $163 |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 | 2.93GHz | 3MB | 65W | $133 |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 | 2.80GHz | 3MB | 65W | $113 |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 | 2.66GHz | 3MB | 65W | $113 |
| Intel Pentium E6300 | 2.80GHz | 2MB | 65W | $84 |
| Intel Pentium E5400 | 2.70GHz | 2MB | 65W | $84 |
| Intel Pentium E5300 | 2.60GHz | 2MB | 65W | $74 |
| Intel Pentium E5200 | 2.50GHz | 2MB | 65W | $64 |
| Intel Pentium E2220 | 2.40GHz | 1MB | 65W | $64 |
| Intel Pentium E2200 | 2.20GHz | 1MB | 65W | $64 |
| Intel Celeron E1500 | 2.20GHz | 512KB | 65W | $53 |
| Intel Celeron E1400 | 2.00GHz | 512KB | 65W | $43 |
| Intel Celeron 450 | 2.20GHz | 512KB | 35W | $53 |
| Intel Celeron 440 | 2.00GHz | 512KB | 35W | $44 |
| Intel Celeron 430 | 1.80GHz | 512KB | 35W | $34 |
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haplo602 - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
can you include linux kernel compilation tests, or something similar or larger (gcc, libqt, X) ??? would help me much more than gaming and 3d rendering benches :-)virvan - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
Anand, I BEG you to include some kind of compilation tests in the "bench" application; some of us are actually programmers that spend more time building than watching or transcoding movies ;)A Linux Kernel bench + some kind of MS Visual C++ benchmark would be extremely welcome.
Btw, when could we expect the old CPUs to be added to Bench? I am specifically waiting for Athlon XP and P3/P4's.
10x
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
I really do want to include a software build test, the question is what is the simplest to setup and run, most representative and most repeatable test I can run?I'd prefer something under Windows because it means one less OS/image change (which matters if you're trying to run something on ~70 different configurations) but I'm open to all suggestions.
Thoughts? Feel free to take this conversation offline over email if you'd like to help.
Take care,
Anand
virvan - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
You could try building a CGAL demo program (http://www.cgal.org/FAQ.html)">http://www.cgal.org/FAQ.html). It is cross platform and big enough (but not too big).I am really a Linux programmer but I could try to help if you are not a programmer. I haven't booted Windows for years but, hey, we have virtual machines nowadays :)
adiposity - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
A fairly decent size build that I do is Qt under VS 2008.Instructions are here:
http://wiki.qtcentre.org/index.php?title=Qt4_with_...">http://wiki.qtcentre.org/index.php?title=Qt4_with_...
Download source here:
http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads/windows-cpp">http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads/windows-cpp
You can use VS2008 Express.
-Dan
haplo602 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
I have no experience with VS 2008. Can it be manualy set to certain amount of compile threads ? make has a command line parameter for this, so you can even test a single threaded compile and scale the number of threads used to exploit the drop off limit (where more threads do not yield better performance).qt is quite huge, but that's ok, since a compilation of a few minutes (linux kernel) won't tell much in the future, when processing power increases.
smitty3268 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
Yes, you can add the /MP parameter in Visual Studio.adiposity - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
From the page I linked before:
Add these line to the .pro file for release version:
QMAKE_CXXFLAGS_RELEASE += -MP[processMax]
-Dan
smitty3268 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
All of Qt might be a bit large for a simple benchmark.Something like Paint.NET or NDepend might make a good C# test.
adiposity - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
Use:nmake sub-src
It only compiles qt libraries, not the tools or examples.
It really does not take very long (less than 10 minutes on a Core2Duo 2.4).
-Dan