Conclusion

This test session ended with a rather unexpected outcome. Earlier, shopping for a value processor was easy as junior Athlon XP models were much faster than Celerons. The release of the two new CPU families, however, changed the situation in this market sector dramatically.

The performance bar of Intel’s inexpensive products has been raised by the 256-kilobyte L2 cache and the 533MHz FSB of the new Celeron D. AMD, on the contrary, lowered the speed of the Sempron compared to the Athlon XP, clocking them at lower frequencies or giving a smaller L2 cache. The company, however, claims that the Sempron is faster than the Celeron D:

AMD is true: the Sempron is faster in the two benchmarks they used (Winstone and SYSmark). But we have just carried out a more comprehensive testing session, which says that the Celeron D is often better than the Sempron in real-life tasks. We found our own “performance ratings” of the processors by calculating the average of the processor’s relative speeds in the 27 benchmarks we used. The results are normalized to those of the Intel Celeron 2.8:

It is clear that the Semprons with ratings of 3000+ and lower, i.e. intended for Socket A systems, are slower than the Celerons working at the frequency that equals that rating, by about 5-6%.

We shouldn’t forget about the Sempron 3100+ model, though. It must be viewed apart from the rest of the family, since this Paris-core processor for Socket 754 systems with the K8 architecture is incomparably better than its junior mates. According to our averaged rating, the Sempron 3100+ is faster than the Sempron 3000+ by about 15%! That’s why its performance is the highest among all the value processors I have reviewed today, approaching that of the Pentium 4 2.8GHz and Athlon 64 2800+.

Of course, the appeal of a value processor is not only in its performance, but also in price. It is quite unreasonable to talk about advantages of a value CPU series without taking the price factor into account. So the next diagram shows you the price/performance ratios for AMD’s Sempron and Intel’s Celeron D series. The X axis shows price, the Y axis – weighted-mean performance:

This picture is self-explanatory I guess. I only wish to draw your attention to the fact that the “averaged” graph is not true for all possible applications. For example, the Sempron family processors are much faster than the same-price Celeron D CPUs in a number of games.