AMD's Winter Update: Athlon II X3 455, Phenom II X2 565 and Phenom II X6 1100T
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 7, 2010 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Phenom II X6
- Athlon II
- Phenom II
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.
SYSMark 2007 is getting very long in the tooth and we're still another couple of quarters away from an updated version for 2011. That being said, it does function as a good representation of lightly threaded application performance. There's little to gain from moving to four cores here and basically nothing to be seen from the move to six cores. The Phenom II X6 1100T is within several percent of the performance of its Core i5/i7 competitors.
The lack of an L3 cache holds the Athlon II back, which is made evident by the solid performance increase seen by the 565 BE. Both of these parts are around 10% off of their competitive performance targets.
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.
In our Photoshop CS4 test, AMD has effectively equalled the performance of the Core i5 with the Phenom II X6 1100T. The i7 860 is a bit faster but the i5 comparison is very close. The Athlon II X3 455 is 15% faster than its closest competitor, the Pentium G6950. The Phenom II X2 565 BE doesn't get many points for its large cache, it's the third core that puts the Athlon II X3 ahead here.
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8steve8 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
kind of surprised sandy bridge wasn't even mentioned in the conclusions...considering these cpus will only be competing with the westmeres for less than a month before sandy bridge is everywhere...
AMD seems to only be able to compete on price, kind of sad.
It'll likely not change as long as Intel is >18 months ahead in terms of process technology used in fabrication.
Calin - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
This opens the door for another article comparing the Sandy Bridge processors (when they will be available) to the current (for now) offerings. I'm too waiting for the Sandy Bridge launch (but I probably won't buy one)semo - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Intel is still selling C2Ds. What makes you think SB will be everywhere any time soon? Intel are always slow with their new releases (not easy supplying the whole globe I would think).vol7ron - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Doesn't the US come first?Einy0 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Think again... Almost all tech companies release products in Asia first.SandmanWN - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Errr "leaked" their first.misfit410 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
I think there is more to it than just price, Intels issue is how fragmented it's market is right now, I like to start with a cheap build, mid range CPU and know I have upgrade options, if I did an AMD Dual Core right now I know that I can go to a 6 Core later for some great performance when it's economically possible.If I go i3, I have very few upgrade options, need a new motherboard for i5, then If I want to move up from there yet another motherboard for i7..
I personally think this was the worst way to go about covering all areas of the market.
BSMonitor - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Except if you went Lynnfield right now, you would already be ahead of AMD's fastest 6-core offering. And much cheaper than buying a $100 processor now, with another $200 processor later.And to the other guy, Intel ramps slowly? Uhhh, not really. Core i7 has been around for 2 years now. In its many flavors. The reason Core 2 Duo still sells... It is actually MUCH faster than that Athlon II x3 Anand just tested.
silverblue - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
LOL... no it's not. I really don't know where you got that from.Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Intel E7500, still selling on newegg for $125. AMD Phenom II X2 560 Black Edition is currently $99 yet wins 17 out of 26 tests on anand's own bench, and is about 5% faster overall. So for 20% less you get faster performance, plus the opportunity to unlock a free bonus. But you can bet the intel part still sells 5 times more.