AMD Athlon II and Phenom II X2 Processors Debut

Name: AMD Athlon II and Phenom II X2 Processors Debut - Page 5
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, June 01, 2009, 09:00 PM EDT

Next we ran a number of processor and platforms, including all five of AMD's new desktop offerings, through Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista, PCMark Vantage. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so the tests can exploit the additional resources offered by a quad-core CPU.

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

Simulated Application Performance

All of the new AMD Phenom II and Athlon II processor performed as expected in PC Mark Vantage, with one exception. For an unknown reason, the dual-core processors would fail during the Windows Media Encoder portion of the TV and Movies test. We informed AMD of the issue, but have yet to get a response. The Athlon II X2 250 performed about on-par with the Core 2 E6850--winning some tests and losing some others--whereas the Phenom II X2 550 outpaced Intel's 3.0GHz dual-core CPU across the board.

Tags: AMD, CPU, processor, Phenom, Athlon, AM3, AM2

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com