Testbed and Methods

In order to evaluate how greatly the new Venice sore affected the performance of Athlon 64 processors compared with the performance of their fellows on ClawHammer and Newcastle cores, we carried out a brief comparative test session for the Athlon 64 3800+ and Athlon 64 3500+ based on different cores. Of course, the SSE3 instructions support as well as the enhancements of the integrated memory controller improved the performance of the new Athlon 64 on E3 core stepping aka Venice. On the other hand, this performance gain will not be that noticeable, because the processor rating system remained the same. What I am trying to say is that the old relation between the clock frequency and performance rating is also true for the new Athlon 64 on Venice core.

There are systems that took part in our test session:

• CPUs:
  • AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (Socket 939, 2.4GHz, 1024KB L2, CG core revision - ClawHammer);
  • AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (Socket 939, 2.4GHz, 512KB L2, CG core revision - Newcastle);
  • AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Socket 939, 2.2GHz, 512KB L2, CG core revision - Newcastle);
  • AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Socket 939, 2.2GHz, 512KB L2, D0 core revision - Winchester);
  • AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (Socket 939, 2.4GHz, 512KB L2, E3 core revision - Venice);
  • AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Socket 939, 2.2GHz, 512KB L2, E3 core revision - Venice);
  • Intel Pentium 4 660 (LGA775, 3.6GHz, 2MB L2);
  • Intel Pentium 4 570 (LGA775, 3.8GHz, 1MB L2);
  • Intel Pentium 4 570 (LGA775, 3.6GHz, 1MB L2).
• Mainboards:
  • ASUS P5AD2-E Premium (LGA775, i925XE Express);
  • EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra (Socket 939, NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra).
• Memory:
  • 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO, 2 x 512MB, 2-2-2-10);
  • 1024MB DDR2-533 SDRAM (OCZ PC2 4300, 2 x 512MB, 3-3-3-8).
• Graphics card: PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (PCI-E x16).
• HDD: Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150).
• OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP2.

The main goal of this test session is certainly to compare the performance of Athlon 64 processors based on different cores. However, we have also included the results for the top Intel Pentium 4 CPUs based on Prescott and Prescott 2M cores. This will allow us to get a better idea of the SSE3 instructions support efficiency in AMD CPUs.

So, let’s get started.