The AMD Athlon 64 3400+:
The Athlon 64 Gets Its First Speed Bump...

By, Marco Chiappetta
January 6, 2004

Futuremark PCMark2002 Benchmarks & Comparisons CPU and Memory Performance

We continued our synthetic testing with Futuremark's PCMark2002 benchmarking suite.  Like other synthetic benchmarks, translating PCMark2002 scores into "real world" performance is not easy.  However, because it is readily available, easy to run, and produces repeatable, comparable results, we've been using PCMark2002 on regular basis here in the lab (Although it will soon be replaced by the recently released PCMark04).  We ran PCMark2002's CPU and Memory performance modules on all five of the test systems.  The CPU module incorporates the following tests:

Just by looking at he graph above, it's obvious this benchmark favors the higher clock speed of the Pentium 4, versus the higher Instructions Per Clock (IPC) of the Athlons.  This is also evident by the Athlon XP 3200+ (2.2GHz) outpacing the Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz).  The Athlon 64 3400+ did perform well in this test, however, as it was beat only be AMD's flagship FX-51 processor and the 3.2GHz Pentium 4.

Memory Test Technical details: (Quoted from Futuremark)

"Raw read, write, and read-modify-write operations are performed starting from a 3072 kilobytes array decreasing in size to 1536 KB, 384 KB, 48 KB and finally 6 KB. Each size of block is tested two second and the amount of accessed data is given as result. In the STL container test a list of 116 byte elements is constructed and sorted by an integer pseudo-random key. The list is then iterated through as many times as possible for 2 seconds and the total size of the accessed elements is given as result. There are 6 runs of this test, with 24576 items in the largest run corresponding to a total data amount of 1536 KB, decreasing in size to 12288 items (768 KB), 6144 items (384 KB), 1536 items (96 KB), 768 items (48 KB) and 96 items in the smallest run corresponding to 6 KB of total data."

PCMark2002's memory performance model painted a somewhat different picture.  The Athlon 64 FX-51 dominated, followed by the 3.2GHz Pentium 4 and then the Athlon 64 3400+ and 3200+ respectively.  The Athlon XP 3200+ came in a distant fifth.  It simply couldn't keep up with the 64's and their integrated memory controllers and the P4's quad-pumped BUS.

Futuremark PCMark04 Benchmarks & Comparisons More CPU and Memory Performance

We also ran the CPU and Memory performance modules available with Futuremark's new PCMark04 suite.  We'll quote Futuremark again for explanations of how these tests work.  "The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. There are nine tests in all. Two pairs of tests are run multithreaded each test in the pair is run in its own thread. The remaining five tests are run single threaded. These tests include such functions as file encryption, decryption, compression and decompression, grammar check, audio conversion, WMV and DivX video compression."

We were only able to test the Athlon 64 3400+, the 3200+ and the 3.2GHz P4 with Futuremark's PCMark04 suite, but these scores should give you a point a reference should you want to compare your current system to our test machines.  As expected, the higher clocked A64 3400+ pulled ahead of the 3200+ by 381 points, or 10.4%, in PCMark04's CPU performance module, but even the new PCMark04 CPU test shows the P4 with a big lead.

"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."

PCMark04's memory performance module shows the Athlon 64 3400+ with a much smaller 130 point (3.6%) advantage over the 3200+, and a 900+ point deficit to the P4.  Although the memory itself was clocked at the same 200MHz on both Athlon 64 test systems, it seems the 10% clock speed advantage of the 3400+'s integrated memory controller does give it a slight performance boost.

Futuremark 3DMark03 Tests Some Synthetic DirectX Gaming Scores

Next, we ran the CPU test built into another Futuremark creation, 3DMark03.  This test consists of two different 3D scenes, that are generated with a software renderer, which is dependant on the host CPU's performance.  The calculations normally reserved for your 3D accelerator, are instead sent to host CPU.  The number of frames generated per second in each test are used to determine the final score.

In the last or our synthetic benchmarks, the Athlon 64 3400+ performed well, but it couldn't quite catch the FX-51 or 3.2GHz Pentium 4.  The FX-51 had a huge lead in 3DMark03's CPU performance tests, in the neighborhood of 23 %, followed not so closely behind by the P4.  Next in line came the Athlon 64 3400+ at about 8.6% behind the 3.2GHz P4.  The Athlon XP 3200+ was again able to nudge ahead of the Athlon 64 3200+. 

Video Encoding & Desktop Applications