X-bit labs

New Budget Processors Comparison: Intel Celeron D vs. AMD Sempron (page 3)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 10/01/2004 | 02:15 PM ]

Intel Celeron D and AMD Sempron: Characteristics and Price

The following table lists the basic characteristics of the models that comprise the AMD Sempron and Intel Celeron D series. Note that the manufacturers both use a rating system for naming their value processors. The correspondence between the rating and the real characteristics is also indicated in this table:

This table provides all the necessary information about the new value CPU series from AMD and Intel. I’d only like to draw your attention to one thing. The ratings of Semprons are assigned according to different rules than the ratings of the Athlon XP or 64. For example, Athlon XP CPUs of the same ratings as Semprons have a higher performance due to a higher clock rate and a bigger amount of the cache memory. So why does AMD apply a new rating system to the Sempron? The answer is simple as soon as you take a look at the prices the manufacturers set for their products:

The official price lists are compiled in such a way that every Celeron D model has a Sempron counterpart with a rating equal to the frequency of that Celeron D. It is on this basis that AMD compares its Semprons with Celeron D models and claims superiority of its processors, though only in Winstone and SYSmark (AMD says nothing about how the Sempron compares to the Celeron D in games, for example).

Testbed and Methods

The goal of this test session is to give you a most comprehensive view of the current situation in the market of CPUs priced below $120. That’s why I took all the models – from junior up to senior ones – from the two value series, Celeron D and Sempron. To give you a perspective of how the performance of the value products differs from that of top-end processors, I also included two 2.8GHz Pentium 4 CPUs on Northwood and Prescott cores as well as an Athlon XP and Athlon 64 (both with 2800+ rating). Besides that, I will show you the results of the Celeron 2.8GHz CPU, just for you to see the progress in the processor development field.

I tested the Celeron D processors on a Socket 478 platform, because LGA755 systems and appropriate hardware are rather expensive and limited in spread right now. Besides, as we proved it in one of our earlier articles, the use of DDR2 SDRAM and PCI Express graphics cards brings no advantages as yet. Note also that, although we deal with inexpensive processors, the test platforms were assembled of rather costly and high-performance parts (mainboards with a dual-channel memory controller, and a graphics card with the ATI RADEON 9800 XT chip) – we wanted to minimize the influence of other devices of the performance of the CPU proper.

So, the testbed systems were comprised of the following hardware:

• Processors:
  • Intel Celeron D 340 (2.93GHz),
  • Intel Celeron D 335 (2.8GHz),
  • Intel Celeron D 330 (2.66GHz),
  • Intel Celeron D 325 (2.53GHz),
  • Intel Celeron D 320 (2.4GHz),
  • Intel Celeron D 315 (2.26GHz),
  • Intel Celeron 2.8,
  • AMD Sempron 2200+ (1.5GHz),
  • AMD Sempron 2300+ (1.58GHz),
  • AMD Sempron 2400+ (1.67GHz),
  • AMD Sempron 2500+ (1.75GHz)
  • AMD Sempron 2600+ (1.83GHz),
  • AMD Sempron 2800+ (2.0GHz),
  • AMD Sempron 3000+ (2.0GHz),
  • AMD Sempron 3100+ (1.8GHz),
  • AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.08GHz),
  • AMD Athlon 64 2800+ (1.8GHz)
  • Intel Pentium 4 2.8E (Prescott),
  • Intel Pentium 4 2.8 (Northwood);
• Mainboards:
  • ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe (Socket 478, i865PE),
  • ASUS A7N8X-E (Socket A, NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400),
  • EPoX EP-8KDA3+ (Socket 754, NVIDIA nForce3 250);
• Memory: 2x256MB DDR400 SDRAM (2-2-2-5 timings);
• Graphics card: ASUS RADEON 9800XT;
• Disk subsystem: Western Digital WD400JB.

I ran my tests in Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c installed. The BIOS Setup of the mainboards was set up for the maximum performance.