AMD's Phenom X4 9950, 9350e and 9150e: Lower Prices, Voltage Tricks and Strange Behavior
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on July 1, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3D Rendering Performance
3dsmax r9
Our benchmark, as always, is the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 test but for the purpose of this article we only run the CPU rendering tests and not the GPU tests.
The results are reported as render times in seconds and the final CPU composite score is a weighted geometric mean of all of the test scores.
Overall performance in our 3dsmax test is quite favorable to AMD (mostly because of one very unique test, which we talk about below). The individual scores however show a very competitive showing by AMD, at least at these price points.
Although hot on its heels, the Phenom X3 8650 is unable to outperform the E7200 here. The 9950 BE manages to pull slightly ahead of the Q9300 and the E8400 and 9550 are basically tied.
This is the test that actually screws the whole thing for Intel. It turns out that CBALLS2 calls a function in the Microsoft C Runtime Library (msvcrt.dll) that, when combined with Vista SP1, can magnify the Core architecture's performance penalty when accessing data that is not aligned with cache line boundaries. This has been fixed in Nehalem, but until then this one 3dsmax test will suffer - giving AMD the advantage here, and making it far more competitive in the 3dsmax overall score.
Intel inches ahead in the performance-per-dollar race here at all of the price points.
Cinebench R10
A benchmarking favorite, Cinebench R10 is designed to give us an indication of performance in the Cinema 4D rendering application.
Single core performance here is dismal for AMD, luckily you get more cores for the same money from AMD and thus once we look at multithreaded performance things change a bit:
The 9950 is now nearly as fast as a Q6600, although Intel maintains the performance-per-dollar lead here. The 9550 manages to outperform the Core 2 Duo E8400 at the same price, simply due to the fact that it has more cores.
POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 24
POV-Ray is a popular raytracer, also available with a built in benchmark. We used the 3.7 beta which has SMP support and ran the built in multithreaded benchmark.
We see a similar breakdown in POV-Ray, AMD is competitive but it can't take any significant lead - cost is the only competitive leg it has to stand on here; thankfully it is one that supports Phenom's weight.
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Regs - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
Between cool n' quite and flimsy power management, it just seems like AMD overshot their goals. Though to me, it seems like they could easily be fixed in Shanghai, but that's if they can keep all four cores busy instead I have 3 cores at stall, and one pumping at max in threaded or shared instruction instances. This will though cause more power consumption, and I think you guys all ready said that mobo support is just not their to power these suckers. You can have your cake, you just cant eat it.What do you goes think about AMD at 2.6 GHz? Looks more competitive stacked up to Intel's finniest at the given price point. Just makes me wonder if the over complicated power management features are keeping AMD from hitting 3.0 GHz or above. What do you think is holding AMD back?
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
Shitty engineering?Griswold - Wednesday, July 2, 2008 - link
Well, I dont know for sure. But its definitely not moronic comments from dumbasses such as you.Assimilator1 - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
Yeah it looks like they've messed up the clock speeds for the lower Phenoms too, lol.Aries1470 - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
Hi,Just found the following strange:
AMD Phenom X4 9850 $205
AMD Phenom X4 9750 $215
The slower one is more expensive, while in the article it has the prices reversed?
"The new Phenom X4 9950 will occupy the $235 space, which will push the 9850 down to $215. The Phenom 9750 will go away temporarily to make room for the new chips at the high end, leaving the 9650 at $195 and the 9550 at $175."
I wonder which one is correct ;-) Hmm... I think a proof reader and an eye for detail is needed :-)
Ok, now for me to read the rest of the article.
Btw, any update on the new VIA Nano CPU - Codename Isaiah? Will there be a review? It is as fast as a 9150e or faster at the same clock speed? It has much less power usage. Now if someone over here could do a review or get more info that would be great, since it is like there is no other x86 competitor out there...
That's all from me.
Gary Key - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
The 9750 pricing will not be changed by AMD officially and thankfully that model is being phased out in the retail sector and replaced by the 9850BE.I have a picture of the VIA Nano PR flag from Computex and a handout explaining how it should perform. That is about as far as VIA is willing to go at this point with information. I did hear from some OEMS that VIA was not even close to getting the CPU out this summer as originally thought, much less advanced reviews. However, we do push them on an almost daily basis for it.