Debut of AMD AM2: the long-awaited DDR2 on AMD Athlon X2
Date: 23.05.2006 |
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Synthetic benchmarks
At the very start, we found out the following: since no modifications to the processor core which would affect the performance of new AM2 chips have been introduced, we should look for dependence of performance variation on the mode of memory controller operation. Since in the new AMD processors (like in "old" К8) all depends on the HyperTransport and there is no FSB at all, the memory controller integrated into the chip does not match any memory type starting with DDR2-400 and DDR2-533 up to DDR2-667, DDR2-800, and even DDR2-1066.
That is why the major focus in our tests was made on selecting the most varied memory operation modes, i.e. we were after an in-depth investigation of variations to the system performance versus the memory frequency and latency timings. Of course, for curiosity we might have added results of tests for other AMD chips or other processor architecture into the comparison tables. But there was no sense in that, because found it more visual to approximate the difference in performance of Socket AM2 and Socket 939 systems to other reviews describing Socket 939 chips instead of depleting our results through bringing in fewer tests of the Socket AM2 system with various memory settings.
On this page, we present the results of test in synthetic benchmarks. For convenience, we highlighted the DDR2 memory operation mode in yellow tints, and in green - for systems with DDR400. After the memory type, there go the memory latency timings at which we ran the tests.
Let's start with Everest Ultimate ver. 2.80.534.
The very first results vividly prove the thesis that AMD processors with support for DDR2 memory would have had nothing to do in the epoch of DDR2-533 occurrence, let alone DDR2-400. As is seen in practice, the more or less impressive "gap" is seen just in a system with DDR2-800 that offers quite decent latency. Even DDR2-667 sometimes loses to the regular not overclocked DDR-400.
Now let's see what PCMark'05 will show.
On the whole, the above stated is proved well enough by the results of tests run in PCMark'05.
And this is the final verdict by PCMark'05:
Summing up the results of testing the new system in synthetic benchmarks, we note that in general the latency and performance of DDR400 memory is in fact comparable to a system equipped with DDR2-667 4-4-3.
That is, being guided by the test results, if I, say, were after replacing a system based on Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 and DDR400 memory and if the retail didn't offer anything better than a combination of the same Athlon 64 X2 for Socket AM2 and DDR2-667 memory, then such a replacement would hardly be reasonable. Quite a different thing would be DDR2-800, but in any case the buyer should carefully examine the price tags for this memory before the purchase. We now will see how reasonable that will be when tested in real applications...
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