AMD Socket-AM2: Same Performance, Faster Memory, Lower Power
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 23, 2006 12:14 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Question on Everyone's Mind: Is AM2 Faster?
We've structured this CPU review a little different than in our past, organizing the content into answers to a series of questions that we had about Socket-AM2 and the performance of the platform. The first question on everyone's mind is, of course, is Socket-AM2 any faster than Socket-939. When we previewed AM2 we concluded that no, it wasn't, however we were using pre-release hardware and it was possible that the performance had changed since then. But the following statement from AMD pretty much confirmed exactly what we expected:
"A fair expectation for performance gain from 939-pin to AM2 is about 1% or more across various application-based benchmarks. That assumes equal model numbers for processors and an equal configuration. This also assumes premium memory is used for each configuration."
With AMD telling us that we should expect about a 1% increase in performance, it doesn't look like Socket-AM2 will have much to offer in the way of performance. Of course we needed to confirm for ourselves, and the table below shows just that:
| Benchmark - Athlon 64 X2 4800+ | Socket-939 (DDR-400) | Socket-AM2 (DDR2-800) | % Advantage (Socket-AM2) |
| Cinebench 9.5 Multi-Core Rendering Test | 660 | 658 | 0% |
| 3dsmax 7 | 2.79 | 2.78 | 0% |
| Adobe Photoshop CS2 | 183.2 s | 180.2 s | +1.6% |
| DivX 6.1 | 54 fps | 54 fps | 0% |
| WME9 | 42.2 fps | 42.7 fps | +1.2% |
| Quicktime 7.0.4 (H.264) | 3.12 min | 3.10 min | +0.1% |
| iTunes 6.0.1.4 (MP3) | 35 s | 35 s | 0% |
| Quake 4 - 10x7 (SMP) | 133.1 fps | 138.6 fps | +4.0% |
| Oblivion - 10x7 | 56.1 fps | 58.0 fps | +3.3% |
| F.E.A.R. - 10x7 | 114 fps | 116 fps | +1.8% |
| ScienceMark 2.0 (Bandwidth) | 5397 MB/s | 6844 MB/s | +27% |
| ScienceMark 2.0 (Latency 512-byte stride) | 47.3 ns | 42.72 ns | +9.7% |
The numbers we're seeing here today for Socket-939 vs. Socket-AM2 are virtually identical to what we saw last month in our preview. Socket-AM2 doesn't appear to offer any tangible improvement in performance except for within certain games and of course in the memory bandwidth and latency tests. Thankfully, on final hardware, we're at least not seeing any drop in performance.
The good news is that if you've just invested in a new Socket-939 platform, you're not leaving any performance behind by not having an AM2 system. The bad news is that, for AMD, the only performance increases this launch will bring are because of the speed bumps of the Athlon 64 FX-62 and the X2 5000+.
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rADo2 - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
K8L is just a marketing, nothing else. Have you seen K8L CPU? No? AMD is about 2x slower than upcomming Conroe, so they have to spread some fud, to keep their fanboys happy...This is the magical performance I am speaking about, AMD cannot come even close:
Intel Conroe @ 3.9GHz: SuperPI 1M - 12.984s
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...ad.php?t=99...">http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...ad.php?t=99...
AMD FX-57 @ 4.2GHz: SuperPI 1M - 21.992s
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=100...">http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=100...
I own X2 4400+ myself (it was a good choice in 6/2005), but within last few months AMD is a very bad choice, as for the price of quite obsolete singelcore AMD you can buy dualcore Intel D930 @ 65nm, and later Conroe. I think only AMD fanboys are buying AMD now, AMD has the worst price/value ratio, and Conroe will only make this gap wider.
Griswold - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
Oh and yea, I run superpi all day long because its such a valuable application that earns me money! :PrADo2 - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
SuperPI tells A LOT about gaming performance ;)mesyn191 - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
SuperPi tells you nothing except how well a CPU runs SuperPi, its not a benchmark.Its also about as in cache and branchless as your gonna get BTW so the performance increases you can get on it by simply scaling clockspeed are impossible as well.
Questar - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
SuperPi is an outlier in Conroe benchmarks.Griswold - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
O rly?Griswold - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
Blablabla...absolsp - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
As suspected, not much of performance gain. Happy with my existing AMD setup.tony215 - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
likewise, I will be sticking with my 939 venice set-up until conroe is released. Even then, I will wait for some more independent conroe test/reviews before going with Intel.Locutus465 - Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - link
After reading reviews of the new chipset offerings from nVidia and ATI, personally I'm glad I'm running an nForce 4 s393 board. Seems to me the new AM2 chipsets and boards are going to need some maturing before they get good. The new solutions were *not* deffinitivly better than what is out there for s939. In fact, nVidia's offering in my opinion was particularly lack luster in terms of actual performance (compared to the older nForce 4 platform).