AMD Phenom Preview: Barcelona Desktop Benchmarks
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 10, 2007 12:03 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
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.
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lopri - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Was thinking the exact same thing. Because the ~20% advantage in games just didn't make sense considering that the gaming benchmark is probably the most single-threaded in nature. If taken as its face value, the performance gain would be huge (which only would grow as the number of core increases).PlasmaBomb - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
CPU-z says the voltage required to achieve 2.5GHz on a Barcelona was 1.52V, what was it set to in the BIOS?Spuke - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
...it looks like AMD will be a great alternative to Intel. The present K8 is already competitive performance-wise with Conroe and the Barcelona core looks to be MUCH quicker than K8. If Penryn is only 5% faster than Conroe, then I foresee Phenom being equal to Penryn. Well, that is unless you believe single digit gains to be LARGE advantages.Hulk - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
"The present K8 is already competitive performance-wise with Conroe..."Huh? Every review I've ever read comparing K8 with Conroe shows Conroe being significantly faster in 9 out of 10 tests at the same clockspeed.
Sunbird - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
And the reviews with P4s and A64 were showing the A64 winning 9 out of 10 at same clockspeeds, the megahertz myth is busted. The only thing that really matters is price to performance and to some overclocking and maybe platform cost and heat...strikeback03 - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Except the post being replied to did not mention price, only performance. In the desktop market Intel currently beats AMD clock for clock and their top parts are clearly faster than AMD top parts. Depending on how much you get your processor for, AMD can be competitive on price per dollar, but on pure performance not so much right now.Spuke - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I said competitive with Intel not "hair on fire" faster than Intel. Two different things. At the framerates these CPU's are getting nowadays, the performance differences are irrelevant at least in gaming and near irrelevant in other benchmarks. Unless you're making money of these systems where every second counts, the differences are truly insignificant. And I won't get into the J6P market.strikeback03 - Tuesday, September 11, 2007 - link
Well, I don't game, so framerates in that sense are rather meaningless to me. On the other hand if I have a couple hundred photos to convert from RAW to TIFF, then open in CS2 and apply some other corrections, the time savings of running on a 3GHz quad-core C2D over a 3GHz AMD solution (1 or two processor) can be significant. I'd imagine those who do video rendering feel the same way.Regs - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
It's really too early to tell. It's what we all expected. They should of been released at 2.6 and scaled up to 3.0+ Ghz. Not 1.8 to 2.5 Ghz.hirschma - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I'd love to know what happens when a Barcelona is inserted into an AMD 4x4 platform. Does it work?