“AMD in many cases delivers greater performance than the similarly priced Intel CPUs, but not nearly a large enough performance gap to make up for the difference in die size. Again, great for consumers, but potentially painful for AMD in the long run. As yields improve AMD should be able to make more of these cores members of the 900 family, but without a separate, smaller die there will still be economic inefficiencies at the lower end.”

“AMD’s Phenom II is very competitive, but the strategy does not have much long term staying power. AMD needs to introduce smaller die versions of its CPUs soon.”

Ask and you shall receive, right?

Intel did a bang up job tarnishing the Pentium name with its clock speed rampage during the Pentium 4 days, but the Athlon brand still holds a special place in our hearts.

This is the Athlon II, and it’s exactly what I’ve been asking for:

The Athlon II X2, to be specific, is a 45nm monolithic dual-core processor.  While the most recent Athlon X2s are derivatives of the original Phenom architecture, the Athlon II is based on the new and improved Phenom II architecture.


The name lives on

Take two Phenom II cores, increase their L2 caches to 1MB, leave out the L3 and you’ve got an Athlon II.  The entire die measures only 117.5 mm^2 and is made up of a meager 234 million transistors.  The table below compares the Athlon II’s die size to other competing parts:

Processor Cores Manufacturing Process L1 Cache L2 Cache L3 Cache Die Size Transistor Count
AMD Phenom II X2 2 45nm 128KB per core 1MB 6MB 258 mm2 758M
AMD Athlon II X2 2 45nm 128KB per core 1MB per core 0MB 117 mm2 234M
AMD Athlon X2 2 65nm 128KB per core 512KB per core 2MB 285 mm2 450M
AMD Athlon 64 X2 2 65nm 128KB per core 512KB per core 0MB 126 mm2 154M
Intel Pentium for Desktop 2 45nm 64KB per core 2MB 0MB 82 mm2 228M

 

The new Athlon II is actually AMD’s smallest dual core processor ever, even smaller than the original Athlon 64 X2.  It’s also AMD’s first 45nm dual-core processor.  It’s also AMD’s first Socket-AM3 processor to carry the Athlon brand (ok, I’ll stop).  As an AM3 chip it will work in both AM3 and AM2+ motherboards, just like the Phenom II.

The Athlon II is only launching with one model today the 3.0GHz Athlon II X2 250.  Priced at $87, it’s likely that we won’t see more Athlon II X2s until AMD is ready to further switch its lineup over to 45nm in order to keep up with demand.

The Phenom II X2 550 BE

We actually get two new dual-core chips today, the second is the new Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition.  Like all of the other chips in the Phenom II lineup, the X2 550 is simply a die-harvested Phenom II X4 part.  In other words, what we have is a quad-core Phenom II with two of its cores disabled.  Given that it’s still fairly early in GlobalFoundries’ 45nm manufacturing process, it makes sense to see so many harvested parts.  I would expect these Phenom II X2 and perhaps even the X3 derivatives to either disappear or shift out of the limelight as AMD’s yields improve.

Because it’s based on the quad-core Phenom II processor, the X2 550 BE has a full 6MB L3 cache that the two cores can share.  The L2 caches are still stuck at 512KB but with a large 6MB L3, there’s very little to complain about.  The unlocked Black Edition part runs at 3.1GHz and retails for $102.

Availability and New Energy Efficient Phenom IIs

AMD is expecting availability for both of these parts in the next week or so.

The table below shows AMD’s new lineup with these two chips.  Note that I’ve also included data on the Phenom II X4 905e and the Phenom II X3 705e.  These two CPUs run at 2.5GHz and have a 65W TDP, down from 125W and 95W for all previous AM3 parts.

Processor Cores Clock Speed un-core Clock L2 Cache L3 Cache TDP Price
AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE 4 3.2GHz 2.0GHz 2MB 6MB 125W $245
AMD Phenom II X4 945 4 3.0GHz 2.0GHz 2MB 6MB 125W $225
AMD Phenom II X4 940 BE 4 3.0GHz 1.8GHz 2MB 6MB 125W $225
AMD Phenom II X4 920 4 2.8GHz 1.8GHz 2MB 6MB 125W $195
AMD Phenom II X4 910 4 2.6GHz 2.0GHz 2MB 6MB 95W $???
AMD Phenom II X4 905e 4 2.5GHz 2.0GHz 2MB 6MB 65W $195
AMD Phenom II X4 810 4 2.6GHz 2.0GHz 2MB 4MB 95W $175
AMD Phenom 9950 4 2.6GHz 2.0GHz 2MB 2MB 140W $173
AMD Phenom II X4 805 4 2.5GHz 2.0GHz 2MB 4MB 95W $???
AMD Phenom II X3 720 BE 3 2.8GHz 2.0GHz 1.5MB 6MB 95W $145
AMD Phenom II X3 710 3 2.6GHz 2.0GHz 1.5MB 6MB 95W $125
AMD Phenom II X3 705e 3 2.5GHz 2.0GHz 1.5MB 6MB 65W $125
AMD Phenom II X2 550 BE 2 3.1GHz 2.0GHz 1MB 6MB 80W $102
AMD Athlon II X2 250 2 3.0GHz 2.0GHz 2MB 0MB 65W $87
AMD Athlon X2 7850 2 2.8GHz 1.8GHz 1MB 2MB 95W $69

And just for kicks here's a specs table with both AMD and Intel CPUs in it:

Processor Cores Manufacturing Process L1 Cache L2 Cache L3 Cache Die Size Transistor Count
AMD Phenom II X4 4 45nm 128KB per core 2MB 6MB 258 mm2 758M
AMD Phenom II X3 3 45nm 128KB per core 2MB 6MB 258 mm2 758M
AMD Phenom II X2 2 45nm 128KB per core 2MB 6MB 258 mm2 758M
AMD Athlon II X2 2 45nm 128KB per core 1MB per core 0MB 117 mm2 234M
AMD Athlon X2 2 65nm 128KB per core 512KB per core 2MB 285 mm2 450M
AMD Athlon 64 X2 2 65nm 128KB per core 512KB per core 0MB 126 mm2 154M
Intel Core i7 4 45nm 64KB per core 256KB per core 8MB 263 mm2 731M
Intel Core 2 Quad 4 45nm 64KB per core 12MB 0MB 214 mm2 820M
Intel Core 2 Quad 4 45nm 64KB per core 4MB 0MB 164 mm2 456M
Intel Core 2 Duo 2 45nm 64KB per core 6MB 0MB 107 mm2 410M
Intel Core 2 Duo 2 45nm 64KB per core 3MB 0MB 82 mm2 228M
Intel Pentium 2 45nm 64KB per core 2MB 0MB 82 mm2 228M
Athlon II X2: Hardware C1E and Return of the CnQ Bug
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  • haplo602 - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link

    can you include linux kernel compilation tests, or something similar or larger (gcc, libqt, X) ??? would help me much more than gaming and 3d rendering benches :-)
  • virvan - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link

    Anand, I BEG you to include some kind of compilation tests in the "bench" application; some of us are actually programmers that spend more time building than watching or transcoding movies ;)
    A Linux Kernel bench + some kind of MS Visual C++ benchmark would be extremely welcome.
    Btw, when could we expect the old CPUs to be added to Bench? I am specifically waiting for Athlon XP and P3/P4's.
    10x
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link

    I really do want to include a software build test, the question is what is the simplest to setup and run, most representative and most repeatable test I can run?

    I'd prefer something under Windows because it means one less OS/image change (which matters if you're trying to run something on ~70 different configurations) but I'm open to all suggestions.

    Thoughts? Feel free to take this conversation offline over email if you'd like to help.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • virvan - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link

    You could try building a CGAL demo program (http://www.cgal.org/FAQ.html)">http://www.cgal.org/FAQ.html). It is cross platform and big enough (but not too big).
    I am really a Linux programmer but I could try to help if you are not a programmer. I haven't booted Windows for years but, hey, we have virtual machines nowadays :)
  • adiposity - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link

    A fairly decent size build that I do is Qt under VS 2008.

    Instructions are here:

    http://wiki.qtcentre.org/index.php?title=Qt4_with_...">http://wiki.qtcentre.org/index.php?title=Qt4_with_...

    Download source here:

    http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads/windows-cpp">http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads/windows-cpp

    You can use VS2008 Express.

    -Dan
  • haplo602 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link

    I have no experience with VS 2008. Can it be manualy set to certain amount of compile threads ? make has a command line parameter for this, so you can even test a single threaded compile and scale the number of threads used to exploit the drop off limit (where more threads do not yield better performance).

    qt is quite huge, but that's ok, since a compilation of a few minutes (linux kernel) won't tell much in the future, when processing power increases.
  • smitty3268 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link

    Yes, you can add the /MP parameter in Visual Studio.
  • adiposity - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link


    From the page I linked before:

    Add these line to the .pro file for release version:

    QMAKE_CXXFLAGS_RELEASE += -MP[processMax]


    -Dan
  • smitty3268 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link

    All of Qt might be a bit large for a simple benchmark.

    Something like Paint.NET or NDepend might make a good C# test.
  • adiposity - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link

    Use:

    nmake sub-src

    It only compiles qt libraries, not the tools or examples.

    It really does not take very long (less than 10 minutes on a Core2Duo 2.4).

    -Dan

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