X-bit labs

Another Gift to Overclockers: AMD Sempron 3100+ on E Core Revision

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Together with the transition of the new Athlon 64 processors to the Venice core, AMD also introduced a new core for Sempron processors aka Palermo. Today we are proud to offer you a review of this budget CPU supporting SSE3 instructions and overclocking up to 2.7GHz clock speed.

Table of contents:

• AMD Sempron 3100+ Version 3: Closer Look
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance
  
• Overclocking
  
• Performance of Overclocked Sempron 3100+
  
• Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Games
  
• Audio and Video Encoding
  
• Computational Benchmarks
  
• Applications Benchmarks
  
• Conclusion
  

Together with the Athlon 64 processor family, which is getting stronger and stronger in the processor market, AMD continues the successful development of its budget Sempron solutions as well. AMD is striving for unified processor architecture that is why they are going to discontinue all processors on the older K7 architecture and focus their efforts on the CPUs with the next generation K8 cores. We have already mentioned a few times that Sempron processors for Socket A form-factor are about to disappear from the market completely, and the entire Sempron family should be moved to processor cores on K8 architecture and Socket 754 form-factor. Now we are ready to say even more: the new 90nm “E” core revision, which has already successfully entered the market in the Athlon 64 processors, will soon come to the Sempron family, too.

On April 4 AMD starts shipping Sempron processors designed for Socket 754 and based on the new E core stepping. And it means that Athlon 64 is going to be not the only one who acquires SSE3 instructions support: from now on AMD’s budget processor will also boast this feature as well as a few other innovations, which we have already discussed in detail in our article called AMD Athlon 64 3800+ CPU: E3 Processor Core aka Venice at the Door.

I would like to stress that the budget processors, just like their high-performance counterparts are very popular in the market today. The thing is that they very often boast excellent frequency potential despite their comparatively low price. So they become a great choice for better value but still fast overclocker’s systems. That is why we were so excited to take a closer look at the new Sempron processors based on the E core stepping. As we have just seen from our detailed review of Athlon 64 3800+, this processor core can provide Sempron CPUs with very important advantage, namely higher frequency potential and hence more efficient overclocking results.

Of course, we couldn’t disregard the changes that happened to the Sempron processor family and when we were lucky to get our hands on the new Sempron 3100+ for Socket 754, we sat down to testing it.

So, let’s find out what benefits the new processors core brought to economical overclockers and hardware enthusiasts.