X-bit labs

90nm Processors from AMD: Athlon 64 3500+, 3200+ and 3000+ (page 11)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 11/25/2004 | 02:25 AM ]

Archiving and Anti-Virus Software

When we test the new processors by one of the most widely spread archiving utilities, the results appear quite disappointing. Although the new 90nm Winchester core is slightly faster than the older NewCastle one (the old Athlon 64 3500+ yields to the new Athlon 64 3500+), both these Socket 939 CPUs are completely defeated by the Socket 754 Athlon 64 3400+ on ClawHammer core. The similar thing happens to Athlon 64 3200+ for Socket 939, which yields to its Socket 754 counterpart because of the smaller L2 cache. The new Athlon 64 3000+ is defeated by its Socket 754 analogue because of the lower working frequency.

The situation is definitely much better for Winchester during antivirus performance check. However, Athlon 64 3000+ for Socket 939 is again not as fast as we wish it could be.

Image Editing and 3D Rendering

The new 90nm core manages to raise the performance level of Athlon 64 processors in Adobe Photoshop. Here I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the new Athlon 64 3000+ is not as fast as the old Athlon 64 3000+ for Socket 754 platforms because of its lower clock frequency.

The same picture can be seen when we measure the final rendering performance of the testing participants. In the tasks of this kind the processor clock rate is very important, and neither architectural enhancements, nor dual-channel memory controller can actually make up for it.