X-bit labs

A Secret Disclosed: AMD Sempron 3000+ for Socket 939 Review (page 8)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 10/12/2005 | 09:43 AM ]

The Socket 939 Sempron 3000+ behaves quite predictably in Adobe Photoshop CS2, taking an intermediate position between the classic Sempron 3000+ and the Athlon 64 3000+.

The memory subsystem performance and the amount of L2 cache memory have just a small influence on the system’s overall speed in final rendering tasks. But the size of the cache becomes a crucial performance-defining factor when you work in the viewports.

It is also the amount of cache memory rather than the memory bandwidth that determines the speed of the system in popular games. The more progressive Sempron 3000+ enjoys an advantage of 5-7% over its Socket 754 analog.

Summarizing the results of the tests we should acknowledge that the transition of the Sempron processor to Socket 939 is going to make it a little faster. However, this architectural change doesn’t affect the overall situation in this market sector much. Intel’s entry-level Celerons D are still superior in some media content processing tasks, while the Semprons are faster in the rest of applications. CPUs of the K8 architecture are especially better than their competitors in modern games (the same situation as in the high-performance CPU sector).