c’t German magazine published numerous benchmarks of AMD’s Athlon 64 processor in the latest issue. Although the article is not available online, some kind guys from AMDZone web-site published the results on the web and thanks to them, we now can share them with you.

I should note that I have no idea, what processor the analysts from c’t actually used for their testing. They state that the chip was the Athlon 64, but with 1MB of L2 cache. Either it is a typo, or they used a processor from the Opteron series, because the Athlon 64 incorporates only 256KB of L2 cache.

Here we go with the testbeds and test results:

Benchmark Results of AMD Athlon x86-64 chip 1.20GHz, Athlon XP 1.20GHz and Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz by c't
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 1.20GHz	AMD Athlon XP 1.20GHz	Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz
Cache (L1+L2)	128KB + 1MB	128KB + 256KB	(8KB + 12 000 micro-ops Trace Cache + 512KB
Memory Type	PC2700	PC2700	PC2100
Peak Bandwidth	2306MB/s	2041MB/s	2080MB/s
Benchmark
3D Mark 2001	8753	7601	9008
Sysmark 2002	178	145	217
Quake III /1024x768x16	225.3 fps	172.4 fps	218.9 fps
Aquamark	49.5 fps	48.3 fps	51.4 fps
Commanche 4	36.6 fps	28.4 fps	36.3 fps
Cinebench 2000 Shading C4D	18.8 CB	12.4 CB	17.2 CB
Raytracing	20.4 CB	16.9 CB	22.4 CB
PovRay 3.5	251 PPS	242 PPS	333 PPS
PovRay 3.1	1037 PPS	948 PPS	1219 PPS
DivX 5.02	569 sec.	709 sec.	497 sec.
Xvid	750 sec.	929 sec.	717 sec.
Linux Kernel 2.4	161 sec.	222 sec.	166 sec.
SpecFP_Base2000	674	504	677
SpecInt_Base2000	739	532	774

The very important thing I would like to point out is the efficiency of the Athlon 64 1.20GHz processor compared to its Athlon XP 1.2GHz. The former manages to outperform the brethren in all the cases, both due to larger L2 cache and architecture improvements. Furthermore, AMD’s baby also functions not much slower compared to the Pentium 4 2.20GHz chip even despite 1.0GHz of the core-clock difference. In fact, in some cases the AMD’s novelty even leaves the Pentium 4 behind. Of course, we should understand that currently Intel’s processor was tested with a single-channel chipset, while AMD Athlon 64 will compete against dual-channel configurations when it finally reaches the market. Moreover, there is no information about performance scalability of the Athlon 64 processor with 256KB of L2.

So, to sum up, we can be sure that the Athlon 64 processors are a very powerful and with efficient architecture. On the other hand, their positions on the market are still uncertain, given that AMD constantly postpones the launch date, while Intel plans to strengthen its Pentium 4 processors with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus and Hyper-Threading technology support in the second quarter 2003. In case AMD’s Athlon 64 CPUs are able to function faster than Intel’s Pentium 4 3.20GHz processors, AMD’s positions on the market will become more solid. Talking about market share, I should admit that AMD will need to supply a lot of its x86-64 processor in order to land more orders from major personal computer vendors. If it happens, AMD may eventually become the provider of the highest-performing desktop CPUs next year, since Intel also postponed the launch of the Pentium 4 “Prescott” chips until the Fall 2003 or even later.