How Well Does Phenom Scale With Clock Speed?
When we compared AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 and the new Phenom 9000 quad core processor last month, Compare Prices on AMD Phenom Processors we forced Windows to utilize only a single processing core, in an effort to understand the real performance differences between the AMD64 architecture and the Stars architecture of the Agena/Barcelona core. Depending on the particular benchmark, the results made clear that Phenom is indeed up to 20% faster than Athlon in a core to core comparison, thanks to its optimizations and the L3 cache. In addition to these performance gains, Phenom’s unified quad core design and smart cache architecture should provide more benefits under heavily threaded conditions. We haven’t looked at the performance difference using all processing cores, as you will find this information in our launch article "Phenom 9700, AMD’s 1st Quad Core CPU". All benchmark results, including a comparison with all Core 2 processors, can be found in our Interactive CPU Charts.
Of course we wanted to get some answers, so we grabbed our test system again : the Asus M3A32 MVP using AMD’s 790FX chipset, an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ processor, a Phenom 9000 engineering sample (unlocked) Compare Prices on AMD Phenom Processors , two 1 GB DDR2-800 DIMMs by Corsair, our Western Digital reference hard drive, and Gigabyte Radeon HD3850 reference graphics card. We ran both processors at 2.2, 2.4, 2.6 and 2.8 GHz clock speeds, to see how well the clock speed increase translates into additional performance.
