AMD's New Year Refresh: Athlon II X4 635, Phenom II X2 555, Athlon II X2 255 & Athlon II X3 440
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 25, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
SYSMark 2007 Performance
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.
Given its age, SYSMark is more of a lightly threaded benchmark by today's standards. Dual core processors (or quad-core chips with aggressive turbo modes) do quite well here. AMD's Phenom II X2 555 BE does better than anything else in its price range. The Core 2 Duo E7500 is probably a good indicator of the Pentium E6600's performance, and it just equals the perf of the 555 BE.
The triple and quad-core chips don't do that well here, there just aren't enough threads to go around.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
If you have threads and need cores, AMD has the medicine. The $119 Athlon II X4 635 handles our Photoshop test with the same elegance as Intel's Core i3 530. The Phenom II X2 555 BE and the Athlon II X2 255 are on par with the Pentium E6300 and should both be a bit slower than the E6600.
x264 HD Video Encoding Performance
Graysky's x264 HD test uses the publicly available x264 encoder to convert a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.
For video-encoding you can't beat the value of the Athlon II X4 635. You get the performance of a quad-core Intel that will set you back another $40. The triple-core Athlon II X3 440 does well here, besting all previous generation dual-core CPUs. Only the Core i3 530 is faster, and more expensive. The Phenom II X2 555 BE and the Athlon II X2 255 perform similarly to their equivalently priced Intel CPUs.
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blowfish - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
And today you're getting 4 cores at 3.4 GHz for 140 / 125W. They'll be lucky and need heavy speed binning to get 3 GHz at 140W for the best 6-core CPU.Well that depends on the process - it might well be feasible at 32NM.
MrSpadge - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
But these CPUs aren't going to be 32 nm. I'd even bet a beer on that.blowfish - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
yes, you're right. I sniffed around a bit online and it seems like they're going to use 45NM, so it's hard to see anything much more than 3GHZ, and even then only on a very mature 45NM process. The die size is also huge - bigger than the Intel 975 EE, so prices will also be well above mainstream.blowfish - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Anand, since anyone doing x264 encoding is interested in the total time required, rather than the times for the first and second passes themselves, don't you think it would make sense to simply combine the two charts into one overall one?The AMD's seem to do well on the first pass, but less well on the second, and whilst that might be of some interest, it's the overall that's actually of any use in determining the ranking order of different cpu's for anyone building an encoding pc.
As ever, love the reviews though!
dgingeri - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Which would be better for a home/ small business server with a base Linux OS and virtualized Windows file server, Linux web and SQL servers?The Athlon II X4 555 or the Core i5 530? I have the drives, power supply, and case, but I'd need to get a MB, Processor, and 8GB memory.
ChristopherRice - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
You would find either of these would do a fine job of that. Really you can throw together an old p4 to do that type of work. All you need to ensure is that you have the ram to support your applications.dgingeri - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Not for the things I would be looking to do with it: SQL server and web server as virtuals for web based POS/ Accounting/ inventory system, or a Virtual machine based streaming web server for music and movies around the house or on mobile devices that would use wireless networking to connect and update.Imagine: turning on your tv, pulling up your home Hulu type app, and bringing up the movie or tv show you want to watch.
or
Imagine: a small store, using thin clients as cash registers and e-mail, iPhones as inventory and ordering modules, centralized printing with nightly backup and RAID 1 mirroring.
Taft12 - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
Well why didn't you just say so in the first place?!dgingeri - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
oops, I meant the Athlon II X4 635, not 555 (getting these stupid numbers mixed up. Why not go with regular clock rate and core count?)Pastuch - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
A huge number of us own a Core2Duo E8xxx series CPU. Can you please post the benchmarks of one of them in this review to give us an idea of how it compares to an overclocked I3 530 or Phenom 2 555? Thanks.