Performance

General Performance

SYSmark 2007, which we consider the benchmark showing integral processor performance, reveals pretty interesting results. As we have expected, Phenom X3 turns out generally slower than the youngest quad-core AMD processor. However at the same time their performance is not any higher than that of Athlon 64 X2 6400+ that runs almost as fast as Phenom X4 9550. So, it turns out that if we base our conclusions only on the data from the diagrams above, we will see that there is barely any market niche for the new Phenom X3. And these processors may be interesting only in very few applications that can load fully all three cores.

In this respect, it is not at all surprising, that Phenom X3 loses to Core 2 Duo processors even to the cheapestE7200 and E6550 models. So it turns out that in a wide range of tasks, during regular, not any specific type of work, even three cores with K10 micro-architecture cannot compete successfully against two cores with Core micro-architecture. And the main problem with Phenom processors is, probably, their low clock frequencies.

However, let’s not draw any hasty conclusions and see how the new Phenom X3 perform in different types of applications.