AMD Phenom Preview: Barcelona Desktop Benchmarks
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 10, 2007 12:03 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
K8 vs. Barcelona: The Phenom Preview
With the test methodology explained, how does Barcelona stack up to a pair of dual-core Opterons? In other words, how much faster can we expect Phenom to be vs. the Athlon 64 X2? To put it succinctly, it looks like around 15% clock for clock:
Clock for clock there's nothing short of a huge increase in performance over the K8 based Opterons in SYSMark 2007. The E-Learning and Video Creation tests are both around the 20% mark, while 3D rendering drops to a 12% advantage, but the productivity suite sees almost a 30% increase in performance thanks to Barcelona. The overall improvement in SYSMark 2007 ends up being 15%.
In fact, the average performance improvement of Barcelona over K8 ends up being 11.5% and 14.3% if we exclude the two 1.8% outliers in our data.
Johan's article showed that Barcelona in the enterprise world is competitive, but on the desktop our data indicates that AMD won't be upsetting Intel anytime soon. Even at 2.6GHz, a 15% boost in overall performance won't be enough to dethrone Intel, but with competitive pricing AMD could actually be a real alternative again.
We have no idea how AMD will price Phenom, but as we suspected, it may be the pricing that ends up deciding how competitive Phenom is.
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AbRASiON - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Anand's final page sums it up really.Pythias - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I sure as hell hope not. If either side prevails, say goodbye to affordable processors.hifisoftware - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I guess it means we just have to say good buy to affordable processors then. Maybe AMD can ramp-up speeds very fast, but until they get there, they will be hurting/losing money. How much can they bleed red ink until it's too much?Howard - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
We'll have more Barcelona server content coming as we spend more time with the system, but be sure to check out Johan's coverage to get a good idea of how Barcelona will compete in its //indended// market.MDme - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I have a feeling that Barcelona will be much more competitive in the server market compared with the desktop market. i.e. Barcey will hold off intel in the server space while it may not be enough to dethrone intel in the desktop arena, it will at least narrow the gap with intel.DeepThought86 - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Barcelona, the chip that launched a thousand flames!Fanbois on both sides: on your mark, get set, go!
KeypoX - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Didnt know why i couldnt view it till now but been waiting all day :)Frags - Saturday, September 15, 2007 - link
AMD needs a Forrest Gump moment with the leg braces flying off to run away from the Bully.The road to Barcelona was a Flop. They need to cut their path to 45nm in half or recieve a blood transfusion soon.
KeypoX - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
but it was called "AMD's Quadcore: defending new found territory" on my google Anandtech article channel.Thatguy97 - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
lol i sadly remember this embarrising launch