The AMD Barcelona/K10 architecture has been launched, and with it the world’s first native x86 quad-core processor. Talks, speculations and rumors of the performance have been going on for months, and just recently benchmarks published at a Taiwanese forum seemed to point to a performance with severe lacks. Fortunately, they were not reliable, but when we look through the previews, article and reviews that have been published today we can’t say that we’re exactly left breathless. For instance, the single-core performance of K10 is not much better than that of K8.
K10 does bring several architectural advantages and improvements. The new Opterons sport a new L3 cache that leaves many of the authors with mixed feelings. The L3 cache namely adds another 20 ns access time to the overall access time (if the processor has to check both L2 and L3) and reduce the memory access time advantage over the Xeon series to almost none.
K10 also brings a number of power saving features and they seem to be working quite well. The new processors that AMD has launched is indeed Cool N’ Quiet. The performance/watt ratio is excellent, but AMD is far from reaching the peak performance of the current Xeon lineup. Simply because of the low frequencies. Today, AMD is shipping two models at 1.9 and 2.0 GHz, with a 2.5 GHz model coming later this fall.
AMD will not be able to meet the peak performance of Intel CPUs with year, but will have to focus on performance/watt instead. With Intel’s upcoming 45nm processors things may change once again though. Right now the new Opteron series looks like a decent upgrade for those already using dual-core Opterons, but not much more.
Over at Anandtech they also decided to do some desktop tests to see how the CPU performs in games, and it does very well. The performance scaling of K10 when compared to K8 is around 10-20%. Higher frequencies also does wonder for K10 as the performance is improved even more than that when they bump up the frequency with 500 MHz.
These improvements are a bit similar to those we’ve seen with the Intel Penryn architecture. The gaming performance of K10 impress us more than the server performance, and hopefully Agena and Kuma will be able to put up a real nice fight against Yorkfield and Wolfdale. We wouldn’t mind seeing some overclocking potential too.
After so many, many months of talk we understand why AMD didn’t hand us any actual benchmarks. Right now we’re not sure what to feel. K10 shows promise, but with the lackluster frequencies available today it is no match for Intel.
Below we’ve gathered some of the articles on the new processors from AMD;
:: TechReport :: Anandtech (Server) :: Anandtech (Desktop) :: HotHardware ::
No active posts found.