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AMD Zacate is faster than Intel Atom for MAME
#247961 - 03/04/11 10:50 PM
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Not that this should really surprise anyone, but I repeated some of the benchmarking that I did last year on my Intel Atom 330 board with the AMD Zacate board that I got last night. I haven't done comprehensive benchmarking yet; I just picked some 'representative' games.
The AMD Zacate board is anywhere from ~25% faster (on heavily multithreaded polygon-based games) to ~70% faster (on single threaded games) than the Intel Atom board.
So I think that for a small form factor, low power, fanless MAME cabinet build, the AMD Zacate platform deserves consideration. Just don't expect to be able to play *every* game because there are still a few dozen games that can't be run at full frame rate on the Zacate.
BTW the Zacate board I benchmarked is an ASUS E35M1-M PRO.
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| R. Belmont |
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Re: AMD Zacate is faster than Intel Atom for MAME
[Re: Bryan Ischo]
#247992 - 03/05/11 05:50 AM
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> Not that this should really surprise anyone, but I repeated some of the benchmarking
> that I did last year on my Intel Atom 330 board with the AMD Zacate board that I got
> last night. I haven't done comprehensive benchmarking yet; I just picked some
> 'representative' games.
Not shocking - AFAIK Zacate's out of order, and Atom isn't 
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Re: AMD Zacate is faster than Intel Atom for MAME
[Re: R. Belmont]
#247994 - 03/05/11 06:29 AM
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> Not shocking - AFAIK Zacate's out of order, and Atom isn't
What amazes me is that in some benchmarking that I have read about on some sites, the Atom comes out ahead in certain programs. I have a strong suspicion that some programs are compiled with Intel specific optimizations for some or all of these. I prefer a test using good ol' gcc which I feel confident is not biased towards one processor or another.
I'm also surprised that hyperthreading has such a tangible benefit in multithreaded applications; the Zacate is consistently 60% - 80% faster than the Atom in MAME single threaded games, but in multithreaded games that drops to 25% or so. Since both processors have two real cores and the Atom has two additional 'fake' cores, the difference can I think be mostly attributed to the benefit of hyperthreading. I always thought of hyperthreading as kind of a gimmick; but I guess there really is something to it after all.
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| DMala |
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Sleep is overrated
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Re: AMD Zacate is faster than Intel Atom for MAME
[Re: Bryan Ischo]
#248000 - 03/05/11 08:25 AM
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> I'm also surprised that hyperthreading has such a tangible benefit in multithreaded
> applications; the Zacate is consistently 60% - 80% faster than the Atom in MAME
> single threaded games, but in multithreaded games that drops to 25% or so. Since both
> processors have two real cores and the Atom has two additional 'fake' cores, the
> difference can I think be mostly attributed to the benefit of hyperthreading. I
> always thought of hyperthreading as kind of a gimmick; but I guess there really is
> something to it after all.
The way I heard an Intel engineer explain it, unless the code is highly optimized, a single thread running on a processor can leave it idle for a significant number of clock cycles. Hyperthreading allows you to reclaim those cycles and utilize the processor more efficiently. So it depends somewhat on what you are doing, but there is definitely more to hyperthreading than just marketing BS.
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| R. Belmont |
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Re: AMD Zacate is faster than Intel Atom for MAME
[Re: DMala]
#248011 - 03/05/11 02:41 PM
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> The way I heard an Intel engineer explain it, unless the code is highly optimized, a
> single thread running on a processor can leave it idle for a significant number of
> clock cycles. Hyperthreading allows you to reclaim those cycles and utilize the
> processor more efficiently. So it depends somewhat on what you are doing, but there
> is definitely more to hyperthreading than just marketing BS.
HT wasn't great when first introduced on the P4 (although it did noticably smooth out animations in the Windows and Linux GUIs) since the P4 never had a lot of power to begin with. But on the Core and Atom chips there's definitely something to it. It's not like Intel marketing invented SMT (the correct term) - IBM was working on it in the 60s.
Also, I think it's entirely possible that some workloads do win on the Atom without cheating. Processor design is a giant maze of trade-offs, and generally neither Intel nor AMD are making exactly the right set for MAME.
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Re: AMD Zacate is faster than Intel Atom for MAME
[Re: R. Belmont]
#248158 - 03/06/11 08:12 PM
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This might have interesting implications for AMD's new Bulldozer CPU coming out later this year..which is basically a much faster version of this technology...i think.
If not faster, then maybe just as fast as Sandybridge in MAME?...which would be a big improvement over the Phenom II/Core 2 Duo situation..
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| R. Belmont |
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Re: AMD Zacate is faster than Intel Atom for MAME
[Re: Ziggy100]
#248170 - 03/07/11 01:29 AM
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> This might have interesting implications for AMD's new Bulldozer CPU coming out later
> this year..which is basically a much faster version of this technology...i think.
The problem with that comparison is that Atom isn't any version of the Core 2 technology. It's got a lot of baked-in performance deficiencies in the name of trying to lower power usage enough to displace ARM in phones with "Wintel" (which they failed spectacularly at, to the extent that MS decided to port Windows to ARM instead). Zacate is aimed more at low-end notebooks where you can blow a few watts here and there on performance.
> If not faster, then maybe just as fast as Sandybridge in MAME?...which would be a big
> improvement over the Phenom II/Core 2 Duo situation..
Sandy Bridge is two things: it's around 5-10% faster per-clock than Wolfdale, and it's Intel's insanely mature process technology that lets me overclock a random mass-produced sample to 4.8 GHz on air. I would love to see AMD compete again there (who knew when they bought ATI that they'd be GPU leaders but lose CPU competitiveness?) but it's not looking good (especially with SNB shipping now and Bulldozer due in 6 months).
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Re: AMD Zacate is faster than Intel Atom for MAME
[Re: Bryan Ischo]
#248468 - 03/10/11 05:12 AM
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Just to follow up:
MAME version benchmarked: 0.137 (because these are the historic values I have from my previous benchmarking of the Atom)
AMD Zacate System: AMD Zacate E350 overclocked to 1680.387 Mhz (a 5% overclock, the best I could reliably do) with 2 GB of DDR3-1119 SDRAM (5% overclock from 1066)
Intel Atom System: Intel Atom 330 overclocked to 1900 Mhz (an 18.7% overclock, the best I could reliably do) with 2 GB of DDR2-640 SDRAM (18.7% overclock from 533).
After some more comprehensive benchmarking (benchmarking ~300 games that ranged from 48.30% frame rate to 172.27% frame rate in my original Intel Atom benchmarking - see the table at http://www.ischo.com/mamebench/overclock.html), I came up with this:
The AMD Zacate system averaged 149.3% of the performace of the Intel Atom (and was thus on average 49.3% faster).
With the Zacate, 85 more games are playable at full frame rate than on the Atom (with no games being more playable on the Atom than the Zacate). These are basically all of the 'yellow' and 'red' games from the link above, except for the first one (racedriv, which only plays at 82.80% average frame rate on the Zacate).
Another interesting statistic: MAME 0.141u3 is on average almost 8% slower than MAME 0.137 for the set of games benchmarked (on the exact same Zacate configuration).
Also possibly interesting: the Zacate system (not including monitor) draws about 21 Watts at idle and 35 Watts under full load, measured at the wall socket using a Kill-A-Watt. These overclocked numbers are about 1.5W more than non-overclocked.
Edited by Bryan Ischo (03/10/11 10:09 PM)
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