AMD Phenom Preview: Barcelona Desktop Benchmarks
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 10, 2007 12:03 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Barc Scaling: 2.0 vs. 2.5GHz
With two significantly different clock speeds on hand, we wanted to see how Barcelona performance would scale once AMD starts shipping at higher frequencies. At 2.5GHz we're running at a 25% higher clock speed than the 2.0GHz Barcelona, the chart below shows what performance improvement you get for the 25% increase in clock speed. Just as before, the benchmarks run are our standard CPU tests with the exception of the gaming benchmarks which are run at 1024 x 768 to ensure that they are CPU bound:
Even limited by its DDR2-667 memory subsystem, Barcelona scales well with clock speed. Windows Media Encoder, 3dsmax and Cinebench all scale almost perfectly with clock speed, and the rest of the tests aren't that far behind. Remember when we heard at Computex that Barcelona will really be competitive at higher clock speeds? It looks like this initial scaling data supports that theory, especially because Intel is very close to not shipping any mainstream desktop parts below 2.0GHz.
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lopri - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Was thinking the exact same thing. Because the ~20% advantage in games just didn't make sense considering that the gaming benchmark is probably the most single-threaded in nature. If taken as its face value, the performance gain would be huge (which only would grow as the number of core increases).PlasmaBomb - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
CPU-z says the voltage required to achieve 2.5GHz on a Barcelona was 1.52V, what was it set to in the BIOS?Spuke - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
...it looks like AMD will be a great alternative to Intel. The present K8 is already competitive performance-wise with Conroe and the Barcelona core looks to be MUCH quicker than K8. If Penryn is only 5% faster than Conroe, then I foresee Phenom being equal to Penryn. Well, that is unless you believe single digit gains to be LARGE advantages.Hulk - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
"The present K8 is already competitive performance-wise with Conroe..."Huh? Every review I've ever read comparing K8 with Conroe shows Conroe being significantly faster in 9 out of 10 tests at the same clockspeed.
Sunbird - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
And the reviews with P4s and A64 were showing the A64 winning 9 out of 10 at same clockspeeds, the megahertz myth is busted. The only thing that really matters is price to performance and to some overclocking and maybe platform cost and heat...strikeback03 - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Except the post being replied to did not mention price, only performance. In the desktop market Intel currently beats AMD clock for clock and their top parts are clearly faster than AMD top parts. Depending on how much you get your processor for, AMD can be competitive on price per dollar, but on pure performance not so much right now.Spuke - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I said competitive with Intel not "hair on fire" faster than Intel. Two different things. At the framerates these CPU's are getting nowadays, the performance differences are irrelevant at least in gaming and near irrelevant in other benchmarks. Unless you're making money of these systems where every second counts, the differences are truly insignificant. And I won't get into the J6P market.strikeback03 - Tuesday, September 11, 2007 - link
Well, I don't game, so framerates in that sense are rather meaningless to me. On the other hand if I have a couple hundred photos to convert from RAW to TIFF, then open in CS2 and apply some other corrections, the time savings of running on a 3GHz quad-core C2D over a 3GHz AMD solution (1 or two processor) can be significant. I'd imagine those who do video rendering feel the same way.Regs - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
It's really too early to tell. It's what we all expected. They should of been released at 2.6 and scaled up to 3.0+ Ghz. Not 1.8 to 2.5 Ghz.hirschma - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I'd love to know what happens when a Barcelona is inserted into an AMD 4x4 platform. Does it work?