Tests

As always in such cases, we are particularly but not exclusively interested in performance results obtained in real-life applications, so we replaced diagrams with tables again, and virtual points with raw test results. The "Advantage" column shows how much faster Wolfdale is versus Agena in percents (as it's the most frequent situation). So in those cases when Agena is winning, this value will be negative and marked bold and red (as it's a very rare situation).

3D modeling and rendering

Strange as it may seem, Maya's render engine apparently prefers the K10 architecture. The 5% advantage is not a deciding factor, of course. Besides, 5% of advantage in rendering speed will hardly weigh down the 20% defeat in interactive operations with this package. However, it's one of the rare cases when Agena becomes a leader. 3ds max definitely votes for Wolfdale, Lightwave joins the club (with much less ardor though).

CAD/CAM

K10/Agena is slower by 10-20% in all tests without exception. As we'll see later, this statement will be a refrain of this review.

Compiling

Unfortunately, we use only one compile test so far, so we cannot compare results. We can only state that Agena is defeated again.

Professional photo processing

Rotate depends much on memory speed, and the integrated controller probably helps Agena narrow the gap, so its defeat is minimal in this test. In other respects the situation is far from peachy: Wolfdale is faster by 20% in most cases, sometimes even getting close to 30%.

Scientific applications

Agena has set its own absolute record in Maple: 17% advantage over Wolfdale. It's the biggest advantage this AMD core managed to produce in our tests. And MATLAB is full of surprises. The first surprise was demonstrated with Phenom, and here it goes again with a single core tests. This time AMD K10 "distinguished" in LU test (matrix decomposing), where it's 76% as slow as the Intel Core architecture. That's another "tragic mistake" again, of course -- either in the library, or in the processor, or somewhere else. But there are even more phenomena in this review where they are least expected. Frankly speaking, we are getting tired of them.

Web server

By the way, the second phenomenon is Real World PHP & MySQL test in PHPSpeed. Agena core has lost almost 60% in comparison with 3-4-5% in other tests. Don't you think that such a situation is typical for this reincarnation of the core? We have some ideas about it, but we'll publish them a tad later.