X-bit labs

New Budget Processors Comparison: Intel Celeron D vs. AMD Sempron (page 4)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Performance

Futuremark PCMark04

The processors of the Celeron D family occupy the top lines of the diagram in this test. The senior models with 2.8 and 2.9GHz frequencies are so confident in PCMark04 that they even outperform the AMD Athlon 64 2800+, which definitely does not belong to the value products category. This is the performance bonus that the Celeron D acquired when transitioning to the Prescott core – 533MHz FSB, dual-channel DDR333 SDRAM and big L2 cache are the factors that contribute to this excellent result. While Prescott-core Pentium 4 CPUs are just slightly faster than their Northwood-core counterparts, the gap between the old and new Celeron families is much wider – the new 90-nm core shows its best sides when employed in low-end processors.

AMD’s Sempron is no match to Intel’s Celeron D in the speed of working with the memory. This comes as the bandwidth of the CPU-memory thoroughfare in Intel’s platforms is higher thanks to the 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus. The theoretical peak bandwidth of this channel is 4.2GB/s with Celeron D CPUs, and only 2.7GB/s with Socket A Semprons (3.2GB/s with the Sempron 3100+).

Note also by how much the Sempron 3100+ is faster than the other members of its family. Based on the K8 architecture, this model features an integrated memory controller that supports single-channel DDR400 SDRAM. That’s why a system with a Sempron 3100+ will have a higher memory subsystem bandwidth than Socket A systems, and a much lower latency, too. Thus, the Sempron 3100+ is capable of providing a much higher performance in real-life applications than other (Socket A) Semprons.