AMD K8 E4 Stepping: SSE3 Performance
by Derek Wilson on February 17, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
SSE3 Performance Analysis
Before running these tests, we confirmed that SSE3 was enabled with the Opteron 252 through CPU-Z.The first test that we will look at is DivX encoding. We used DivX 5.2.1 with AutoGK 1.91 as a front end. Chapters 19, 20 and 21 of The Chronicles of Riddick were used as the test material for this analysis. We turned off audio and used the 75% quality setting.
As these results are within 3% of eachother, we can see that there is not much performance advantage clock for clock under DivX 5.2.1 using SSE3.
The second test that we looked at was purely synthetic. CPU RightMark uses the processor to manage the physics and rendering of a 3D scene. There are lots of configuration options, but we went with the default for each CPU that we tested (just start up the program and hit run). The highest level of floating point support is chosen automatically in each case (SSE2 for Opteron 250, and SSE3 for Opteron 252 @ 2.4GHz).
Straight math performance on these parts is essentially the same. When we look at prerendering and rendering performance, we see differences. It's clear that the SSE3 codepath shows an advantage over the SSE2 codepath in CPU RightMark. Even though this is a synthetic test, we can definitely see that doing the same thing with SSE3 over SSE2 offers an advantage.
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SkAiN - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
bigpow - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
Funny.I work at one of the largest high tech company today and I can't find any of these Opteron servers. My friends also notice the same trend.
Large corporations are sticking with Intel, enough said.
Nice step forward for AMD, still far away to catch Intel.
For my PC, I use AMD AthlonXP (soon-to-be A64). I wouldn't go with Intel for my use. But then again, I wouldn't go with Opteron too.
Who's buying this Opteron again?
DerekWilson - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
Unfortunately, the platforms I have available to test the Opteron on (nforce 3 pro and nforce pro 2200) only offer overclocking in the form of nTune. And these platforms do not like being pushed out of spec.We also have many more tests to run on these processors and platforms and don't wish to see an unfortunate lab accident consume our samples before we squezee all the data out of them we are looking for.
If we finish all our planned tests with Opteron 252, we may look into overclocking. But that will sit on the back burner for some time either way.
dannybin1742 - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
isn't this rev supposed to use strained silicon too?ozzimark - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
i know these are opterons, but are we going to get an overclocking article on the new core soon?skiboysteve - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
its funny how intel comes out with SSE, SSE2, SSE3... to compensate for weak x87 FP and a long pipe, but because of marketing AMD has to adopt these instructions as well on a very resiliant cpu that doesnt have such pickyness about code... so slap on SSE2 sticker and the performance is no better.you could almost blame the kick ass FP performance?
im not trying to be biased, but i mean, look at the numbers, its the truth. it takes allot of work to make a long pipe work great in all areas.
Fricardo - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
Do you guys have any word on when the revision E stepping comes out for the Athlon 64's? I wonder how long of a gap AMD wants to leave before releasing their desktop parts.jimmy43 - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
In any case, AMD is slowly catching up to Intel in the media encoding segment..Hey more features, im not complaining!