AMD vs intel Dual Core

By Rich Brown
Senior associate editor
AMD co.inc
November 23, 2007



You may recall a few months back when AMD took out full-page newspaper ads to challenge Intel to a dual-core server duel. Intel declined to take up AMD on its offer, but the challenge got us thinking: what would the results of a dual-core desktop CPU fight look like? Many people equate Windows PCs with Intel Pentium processors (and soon will likely be doing the same with Macs), but we've seen dual-core CPU AMD systems power ahead of dual-core Intel-based PCs on more than one occasion.

To answer the question once and for all, we circled up a bunch of cars in an abandoned parking garage and set ourselves to a no-holds-barred dual-core desktop CPU fistfight. AMD submitted its five dual-core CPUs, and Intel matched with its lineup of four. We built two test beds as nearly identical as we could for the two platforms and ran each chip through a battery of tests. We then ran those results through our price-vs.-performance calculator to find out not only which is the best overall dual-core CPU in terms of raw performance but also which one offers the most bang for your buck. Skip ahead to the official ruling if you want, but the match itself is interesting.

• Gaming
  

3D gaming opens up a can of worms for performance testing because it's so commonly associated with 3D graphics cards. The processor does affect 3D performance, however. In order to test our CPUs' 3D capability, we created a so-called CPU-limited Half-Life 2 benchmark, which turns off all of the advanced graphics features, as to minimize the calls to the onboard graphics chip. This lets the CPU do most of the 3D heavy lifting.
Intel should be embarrassed with its showing in round 2. At every turn, AMD beat it to the punch. Even the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, the lowest end of AMD's dual-core CPUs, is better suited to 3D gaming than Intel's highest-end Extreme Edition 840 CPU, which lost by a full 10 percent.

That said, we should point out that games aren't really designed to take advantage of CPUs with multiple processing threads yet. We expect to see multithreaded games that will take advantage of dual-core CPUs sometime next year, at which point the 3D gaming results will need revisiting (there will likely be new chips available by then, as well). But for now, if you are a gamer in need of a dual-core rig, the only choice you need to make is deciding which Athlon X2 chip to pick up.

• Multytasking
  

Our SysMark test gauges a processor's ability to work with a series of applications, but it doesn't really give us an idea of how well a CPU handles two intensive tasks simultaneously. That's where our multitasking test comes in. If you've ever run a virus scan on your PC (and we hope you have), you've likely experienced the swimming-in-molasses effect this process has on overall performance. But if you believe the marketing hype, dual-core CPUs are supposed to make virus scanning faster while letting you perform other tasks at the same time without delay.

To test dual-core CPUs then, we employ McAfee's VirusScan to inspect 40GB worth of files, while simultaneously encoding an 85MB video file using a program called Dr. Divx. We then time how long it takes each chip to complete both tasks. The results of our tests skewed heavily in AMD's favor (sensing a pattern yet?).

The best Intel could place on this test was fourth, with its $999 Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840 chip coming within 4 seconds of the $507 Athlon 64 X2 4400+. It's also interesting to note that all three of Intel's Pentium D chips finished last on this test. As we saw in the last round with the gaming test, AMD overachieves to the point where even its budget Athlon 64 X2 3800+ chip outpaces Intel's second-fastest Pentium D 840. If you are like most computer users, you have more than one window running more of the time. And if you are like most computer users reading this story, you will draw the same conclusion as we have: AMD's Athlon X2 processors are the clear choice for superior multitasking performance.

• Photo Editing
  

Depending on your level on interest in the hobby, photo editing might mean anything from a simple edge crop of a shot from your daughter's wedding to running a wedding photo business of your own. Our Photoshop test represents a task common to many photographers: converting large-size images to Web-appropriate file sizes.

The results of this round mirror those of the first round with our SysMark application test. AMD has a clear advantage with the higher-end chip, and the results get closer as you move down into the mainstream and lower-end chips. AMD's top three X2 chips finished at the top, but Intel and AMD exchanged even blows when we looked at the Pentium D 840, 830, and 820 chips matched up against the Athlon X2 4200+ and 3800+ chips. The round still goes to AMD for the showing by its top three X2 chips, but at least Intel was competitive in this round--unlike the last two.

• mp3 Encoding
  

If there's one modern multimedia task that affects the broadest swath of people, it might be MP3 encoding. Even though loading music into iTunes from a CD isn't exactly demanding, it's a common enough task that is easy to relate to the test results. iTunes also has the distinction of being a multithreaded application, which means that it's programmed to take advantage of multiple processor threads, making it ideal for dual-core CPU testing.

The results from this round are second only to the 3D gaming results in terms of AMD dominance. The only AMD processor that's slower than an Intel CPU is the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, but even that CPU manages to outpace Intel's lower-end dual-core chips, the Pentium D 830 and the Pentium D 820, in ripping an album to MP3 in iTunes, by 9 and 14 seconds, respectively. If you think that's bad for Intel, the difference between the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 is even worse, to the tune of a 23-second difference, or a whopping 20 percent.

• Vedio Encoding
  

With products such as Microsoft's Windows Media Center operating system and the video-capable iTunes 7, a computer's ability to encode video will only become more important. That said, we suggest you pay extra attention to these video-encoding scores if you're building a PC with any intent to integrate it into your home entertainment scheme.

Intel made its most competitive showing on our video-encoding test. AMD still wins the round, but the difference is not as pronounced as it is on other tests. The Athlon 64 X2 4800+ takes its familiar perch atop the performance chart, and both it and the Athlon 64 X2 4600+ stand out from the pack in a noticeable way. The processors in the middle of the performance scale, however, are so close that they're statistically tied, with less than 4 seconds and 2 percentage points between the Pentium D 840 and the Athlon 64 X2 4200+. Perhaps we should no longer be surprised that AMD's midrange chips compete well with Intel's higher-end CPUs, but that AMD's dual-core CPUs have maintained such a consistent streak of high performance should impress even the most adamant of Intel apologists.


The winner is :::

AMD...


It wasn't even close.

After reading the round-by-round account of our dual-core desktop CPU prizefight, it should come as no shock that AMD's Athlon 64 X2 chips are the runaway victors here, laying out the Intel Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition 840 chips pins up. If we had to call out one chip, AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4400+ is an outstanding bargain given the competition, but as our results show, any AMD dual-core CPU will serve you better than its similarly priced Intel equivalent.

If you're wondering why there's such a striking performance difference between the two companies' processors, it likely has something to do with the memory controller. Among the technological differences between the two, AMD's memory controller--the component that sends information back and forth between your system's CPU and the memory--is an integrated part of the Athlon 64 X2's chip architecture. Intel's memory controller, however, exists as a separate piece of silicon on the motherboard. The additional distance between the CPU and the memory controller adds to the processing lag time and likely plays a part in Intel's lower scores.

Whatever Intel's strategy, it doesn't seem to have held up. We're very interested to see what happens when the next generation of chips and chipsets hits the market starting in January. But until then, AMD's Athlon 64 X2 should be your dual-core processor of choice.

Find out more about how we test desktop systems.

Intel test bed
Asus P5N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard; Nvidia Nforce 4 SLI chipset; Crucial 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 7800GTX (PCIe); WDC WD740GD-00FLA2 74GB 10,000rpm SATA; Windows XP Professional SP2; Antec 550w power supply

AMD test bed
Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard; Nvidia Nforce 4 SLI chipset; Crucial 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 7800GTX (PCIe); WDC WD740GD-00FLA2 74GB 10,000rpm SATA; Windows XP Professional SP2; Antec 550w power supply