AMD Athlon II X4 620 & 630: The First $99 Quad Core CPU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 16, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:
Offline 3D rendering should be another safe haven for the Athlon II X4. Core count matters and that's what AMD delivers. At $25 per core the Athlon II X4 620 is faster than even the X3 720. It's of course faster than any dual-core CPU in its price range, including the more expensive E7500. Intel's Core 2 Quad Q8200 is around 6% faster but costs 60% more.
Cinebench R10
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
Single threaded performance is where the Athlon II X4 suffers the most. It's competitive but still slower than cheaper dual-core CPUs. This is the classic trade off for all pre-Lynnfield quad-core CPUs, you give up single threaded performance for multi-threaded performance. Luckily for AMD, Intel's Core 2 Quads suffer the same fate. While the Athlon IIs find themselves at the bottom of this chart, the Q8200 is the slowest chip here.
Turn up the thread count and the Athlon II shines once more. Again, the 620 is about the same speed as the Q8200, but slower than the Q8400. Just where it needs to be.
POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
At this point I couldn't write a more competitive position for AMD. The Athlon II X4 continues to do very well in our 3D rendering tests.
Blender 2.48a
Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.
Our Blender test has traditionally favored Intel architectures, and here we see the first signs of the Athlon II X4 not being able to keep up. The Phenom II X3 720 and Core 2 Quad Q8200 are both faster, but compared to Intel's similarly priced dual-core offerings AMD is still quicker.
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Genx87 - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
This losing battle for AMD has been going on since the introduction of the Core 2 Duo years ago. Where have you been?mdk77777 - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
945 has been at $170 for weeks. That's a $55 difference from the price listed by ANAND :!: , it is also available at 95 watt :!:955 has been at or below $200
But that would conflict with the second coming of I5 at $210 so he conveniently ignores current pricing. :mrgreen:
Talk about bias, you write an article about pricing and market position and then ignore current pricing and market positions.
Pretty amazing.
Voo - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
You do understand what the listed prices are, and just want to flame, right?mdk77777 - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
How does AMD respond to Lynnfield? Is it by drastically cutting prices on Phenom II? Nope.Thats how the article starts. Correct, but they lowered prices weeks ago in anticipation.
A list price means nothing if it has been widely, significantly, and uniformly discounted.
Obviously they will update. Again, a story about market prices and market value of various CPU should reflect the market pricing.
yacoub - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
you are correct that the actual prices are what matters -- after all, the entire point of this (and most if not all) article(s) here are for the benefit of people considering a purchase.Lolimaster - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
And then they talk about anand not being biased...PII 955 $189
PII 945 $169
Hey even in my country (Peru) wich has a lot of tech taxes the 955 costs less than AMD "official" price.
silverblue - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
Depending on which sites someone uses, they may not offer a better deal than another site they may be unaware of, likewise they could get a CPU for cheaper than you or I can. It's strictly relative in the end and doubtful to be the result of some sort of bias. Anand seems very impressed with the Propus and so too will be a lot of other people.Looking more closely at it, I believe it should perform closely with a similarly clocked (or overclocked?) Phenom I due to the lack of an L3 cache, though I couldn't say which would perform faster. Incidentally, I've been checking dabs.com and their most popular CPU is the Phenom X4 9650 at about £80; this is only 2.3GHz and is more expensive than the newly-launched Athlon II X4 620 by about £5, so it stands to reason that people will go for this one instead soon enough.
What I would really like to see, however, is a direct comparison between the 620 and the PII X4 905e (2.5GHz, 6MB L3) - it should be relatively simple to overclock one/downclock the other and see how much the lack of an L3 cache hurts the Athlon in a head-to-head, why the Athlon II X4's TDP is 95W whereas the 905e (with the 6MB L3 cache, remember) has a TDP of 65W, and whether it's worth the extra £50 for the 905e.
I did look at other CPU prices on this site as well as on a couple of others. The PII X4 955 and the i5-750 are roughly the same at about £150-£155 (though dabs.com has the 955 as £165 for some daft reason), whereas the PII X4 965 is closer to £180. It's very important to look around for the best price, however I'm starting to doubt the reason for the 965's existence now, at least until they cut its price.
mapesdhs - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
Indeed, shopping around is essential, and watchout for shipping
charges aswell.
After deciding what to buy, I Google for the part numbers or names
of the items I want, gather a selection of sites, see what can be
saved re shipping costs by buying multiple items from one seller.
I've ended up using a variety of companies over the years, sometimes
well known (Dabs, Scan, Microdirect), sometimes more obscure (Komplett,
C&C Central, Lambdatek, Overclockers, Tekheads). And doing it this
way means one has a better chance of locating special offers. I also
check on eBay for BIN offers from reputable sellers, which in one
case resulted in the best price for a PSU I wanted. The company names
above are in the UK, but the same applies anywhere.
Ian.
East17 - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
1. A benchmark should test the architecture clock for clock. Dynamic overclocking just messes things up even if it's on by default.Sure Turbo is a nice addition and sure it should have been available ever since dual core CPUs appeared just to prove customers that you're doing something about single thread performance too.
Turbo is a feature, not an architectural advantage. It's like saying a mainboard with Quad GigabutLAN on P45 is more performant than a Dual LAN on X58 just because it has this feature of having four LAN ports. Sure, if you do a LAN performance test you could find many ways in which you could show that the mainboard with Quad LAN is faster but surely you couldn't argue that P45 is superior to X58.
Anyway ... the testing shoul have been done with Turbo on and Turbo off to clearly show thr difference .
2.Deneb is 252% of Propus (300mln -> 758 transistors) but only offers around 10% performance improvement... Could you justify making the die size so much bigger just for 10%? Besides, if we talk about profit, if 252% = 225$ (Phenom 3GHz) and 100% = 99$ (Athlon II X4) ... Propus seems more profitable .
carniver - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Athlon: Emergency Edition