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Intel Wolfdale vs. AMD Agena



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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


Benchmark Wolfdale Agena Advantage
3ds max
CPU Render 2.59 2.10 24%
Graphics 3.61 3.06 18%
Hardware Shaders 9.43 7.42 27%
Maya
GFX 2.81 2.41 16%
CPU 4.98 4.05 23%
Render 0:24:46 0:23:36 -5%
Lightwave 0:16:27 0:17:28 6%
Group Score 63 54 15%

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


Benchmark Wolfdale Agena Advantage
UGS NX
Total CPU 3.65 3.35 9%
Total Graphics 1.98 1.80 10%
Pro/ENGINEER
CPU Related tasks 740 812 10%
Graphics Relatsed tasks 883 1010 14%
SolidWorks
Graphics 76.74 80.17 4%
CPU 52.36 57.78 10%
Group Score 99 91 10%

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


Benchmark Wolfdale Agena Advantage
VisualStudio 0:40:03 0:46:22 16%
Group Score 74 64 16%

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


Benchmark Wolfdale Agena Advantage
Photoshop
Blur 0:15:56 0:19:32 23%
Color 0:03:26 0:04:06 19%
Filters 0:05:24 0:06:58 29%
Light 0:02:56 0:03:30 19%
Rotate 0:05:58 0:06:16 5%
Sharp 0:05:50 0:07:32 29%
Size 0:01:20 0:01:28 10%
Transform 0:03:08 0:03:28 11%
Group Score 57 48 18%

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


Benchmark Wolfdale Agena Advantage
Maple 0.0278 0.0333 -17%
Mathematica
Internal 2.3230 2.2950 1%
MMA 1.1867 1.1488 3%
MATLAB
LU 0.1143 0.2010 76%
FFT 0.1450 0.1631 12%
ODE 0.1868 0.1834 -2%
Sparse 0.3023 0.3703 22%
2D 0.2984 0.3633 22%
3D 0.5549 0.5639 2%
Group Score 81 73 11%

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


Benchmark Wolfdale Agena Advantage
PHP Calculator 42 38 11%
PHPSpeed
Synthetic PHP 2790 2572 8%
Synthetic MySQL 2394 2302 4%
Synthetic Read/Write 1815 1758 3%
Real World PHP 5069 3700 37%
Real World PHP & MySQL 2269 1435 58%
Server 1840 1751 5%
Group Score 80 68 17%

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.


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Page 1: Introduction

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Page 3: More tests, conclusions



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