X-bit labs

AMD Athlon 64 3800+ CPU: E3 Processor Core aka Venice at the Door (page 11)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

And here is one more very curious result. WinRAR is an application that is very sensitive to the memory subsystem performance. However, this benchmark provides practically the same result for different Athlon 64 processor cores: Newcastle, Winchester and Venice.

ScienceMark 2.0 benchmark using mathematical modeling methods does support SSE3 instructions set. However, we see once again that this innovation in the Venice processor doesn’t have any positive effect on the score.

The final rendering speed measured in the 3ds max 7.0 generates even more suspicious result. The best performance here belongs to Athlon 64 processors based on the old 130nm ClawHammer and Newcastle cores. The newer core versions, Winchester and Venice, cannot boast the performance as good as that of their predecessor here.

In Photoshop CS Athlon 64 3500+ processor with E3 core stepping outpaces its predecessor, Athlon 64 3500+ on D0 core stepping, by 0.4%. This is a pretty logical result.

This way, we have to admit that the performance of the new Venice processor has grown up just a little bit compared with that of the predecessor on the Winchester core. The average advantage of the Athlon 64 3500+ with E3 core stepping over its counter part with the previous D0 core stepping is about 0.7%. This is considerably less than the performance growth we observed between the new Winchester core and the Newcastle core. So, we have to state that the memory controller tweaks implemented in the new processor core are really insignificant for the overall CPU performance. As for the SSE3 instructions support, it is hardly of any effect at all, and simply adds a new item into the list of Athlon 64 features.

All in all, the performance of the processors based on the new Venice core wasn’t that very surprising. Now let’s take a closer look at the frequency potential of this core. Maybe we will find out something special there?