X-bit labs

New Budget Processors Comparison: Intel Celeron D vs. AMD Sempron (page 7)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Office and Digital Content Creation Applications

AMD assigned ratings to the processors of the Sempron family basing on the results these processors had in Winstone and SYSmark benchmarks. It was done for the performance of each Sempron to be higher than that of the Celeron D of the same price. That’s exactly what we see in the diagrams above.

Video, Audio Encoding

Encoding audio into MP3 format is a specific task. The memory bandwidth and the size of the cache matter little here. It is the raw speed of the central processor that’s important now. Keeping this fact in mind, you can easily explain the results: the Semprons for Socket A are slightly faster than the Celeron D, while the Sempron 3100+ loses to its Socket A mates with a lower rating because they work at higher clock rates. All in all, there are no surprises here.

The cache size and the memory speed don’t play a crucial part when encoding raw video into MPEG-2 format, either. However, unlike in the audio encoding task, Intel’s CPUs are much faster thanks to the efficient support of SIMD instructions (a fast SSE2 unit and support of SSE3).

The Celeron D processors are faster than the Semprons when encoding video into MPEG-4 format with the DivX codec. The Sempron 3100+ surpasses its Socket A mates, but can only compete with the Celeron D 325 that is clocked at 2.53GHz.

It’s practically the same with the XviD codec. Intel’s transitioning the Celeron series to the Prescott core resulted in a considerable performance boost. Older Celeron and Pentium 4 processors (on the Northwood core) used to lose to AMD’s products in this test, but now the Sempron and the Athlon 64 find themselves on the losing side.