AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+. Diagonal races
Test Results
Our readers must have already noticed that for the recent
months we have substantially renewed the list of benchmarking suites
used at our test lab. That is related to a number of reasons, but apart
from the natural "ageing" regarding the measurement of CPU performance
there are two more key reasons worth mentioning. That is, first, the
emergence of multicore chips which need parallelized tasks to
adequately estimate their performance. Secondly, the emergence of truly
interesting test applications which skillfully emulate such real
processes like scientific computations, rendering, multimedia content
operations, etc.
In future, additionally to the benchmarking suites presented
today we'll add a number of other no less important and visual. Today,
taking the opportunity, let me briefly describe the capabilities of
some popular benchmarking suites.
PCMark 2005 – a synthetic
benchmark that allows deeply enough to investigate the performance of
specific PC subsystems – CPU, memory, storage. Due to the
feature for auto detection of the CPU type installed, it is possible to
load dynamic libraries with the code optimized for AMD or Intel. Of
special interest are the tests which fit within the voluminous L2 cache
of modern chips.
In fact, no surprise has been brought by testing under PCMark
2005 - Core 2 Duo E6600 takes a lead everywhere except the memory
latency test.
3DMark 2006 – a good synthetics
to emulate gaming applications with support for modern 3D technologies
(less the DX10 capabilities) at various screen resolutions. This
benchmarking suite is also interesting in that it allows putting
adequate load upon multicore chips. The leadership of Core 2 Duo E6600
at this suite is evident, although we should be always aware that
3DMark 2006 is still synthetics, and while testing in real games the
result may be not so evident.
ScienceMark 2.0 – also a
synthetic benchmark, however, it is aimed at imitation of scientific
and engineering computations with a heavy load upon the memory bus.
Therefore, it is quite logical to observe some superiority of
Athlon 64 X2 5000+ related to the integrated memory controller that
offers low latency.
POV-Ray 3.70 - a very interesting and free
rendering utility. The current version of the suite for Windows is
under development and beta testing, but already supports multithreading.
Cinebench 9.5 – a fresh version
of benchmark that imitates creation of 3D content based on Maxon Cinema
4D engine.
Final words
Well, is the CPU Athlon 64 X2 5000+ worth the money it is
asked for today? The answer is not that evident as one would like to.
Of course, this CPU demonstrates a superb performance, but in most
cases – especially where the load upon memory bus is less
intensive, the new architecture Intel Core wins back, and Athlon 64 X2
5000+ anyway gives in to the conditionally "equivalent" Core 2 Duo
E6600.
At the same time, if we view Athlon 64 X2 5000+ as an option
for migration to the Socket AM2 platform (e.g., from Socket 939)
keeping a future upgrade in mind, the purchase of such a chip can be
quite reasonable - new 65 nm processors for desktop PCs are already at
hand and they are also aimed at Socket AM2. In fact, transition to the
Socket AM2 platform should be effected from other chips –
say, something like AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and lower. But that is
already a different story...
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