X-bit labs

AMD Athlon 64 3800+ CPU: E3 Processor Core aka Venice at the Door (page 10)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 04/03/2005 | 04:06 PM ]

Moreover, we shouldn’t forget that SSE3 support is the major marketing attraction of the new Athlon 64 processors. The best effect from these instructions is available today only in some audio/video codecs, because other applications supporting SSE3 are not that widely spread in the market yet. Therefore, we decided to pay special attention to the performance of Venice based processors in audio/video encoding and digital content creation applications.

Unfortunately, we did not reveal any qualitative changes in the audio/video encoding tasks by different codec. The SSE3 instructions support introduced in Venice based Athlon 64 processors failed to provide the anticipated improvement, despite all our expectations. Although two codec from the set of applications we used do support SSE3 instructions for sure (these are DivX and Mainconcept MPEG Encoder), we do not see any performance growth once we shift from Winchester to Venice core. So, we have to conclude that SSE3 instructions (or at least their implementation in the new Athlon 64 processors) are of no practical use. Although we have to keep in mind that there will be more applications coming out in the future, that will take better advantage of SSE3 instructions.