AMD Athlon 200GE or Intel Pentium Gold G5400? A Review
by Ian Cutresson January 14, 2019 8:00 AM EST
- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Intel
- Athlon
- Pentium Gold
- 200GE
- G5400
95 Comments
|
95 Comments
The $60 CPU QuestionTest Bed and SetupOur New Testing Suite for 2018 and 2019CPU Performance: System TestsCPU Performance: Rendering TestsCPU Performance: Office TestsCPU Performance: Encoding TestsCPU Performance: Legacy TestsGaming: Integrated GraphicsGaming: World of Tanks enCoreGaming: Final Fantasy XVGaming: Shadow of WarGaming: Civilization 6 (DX12)Gaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)Gaming: Strange Brigade (DX12, Vulkan)Gaming: Grand Theft Auto VGaming: Far Cry 5Gaming: Shadow of the Tomb Raider (DX12)Gaming: F1 2018Power Consumption: TDP Doesn’t MatterOverclocking on AMD Athlon 200GEConclusion: Split Strategy
In the course of our reviews, when we get a chance to get hands on with random processors, we run our test suite and add the data to our database. Sometimes that doesn’t materialize directly into a review, but at least we have the data. Two very similar CPUs have come across my desk recently: AMD’s dual core Athlon 200GE, and Intel’s Pentium G5400. Both chips round to the $60 mark, have some form of integrated graphics, and are aimed at budget systems.
This is going to be fun
One of the perennial issues with modern technology review cycles is that there’s a lot of focus on the high-end parts. These are the ones that the manufacturers sample: they have the highest margins, but are also the halo products: if they sit atop of the standings, then the hope is that that influence will trickle down into the rest of the product range, typically the high-volume parts. There is also the added benefit that more people want to hear about the best of the best. It’s a reason why there are so many Ferrari and Aston Martin ‘WOW’ pieces in written and video media.
Normally this would make sampling very difficult. If we were reviewing cars, anyway. The two chips in today’s analysis, the Intel Pentium Gold G5400 and the AMD Athlon 200GE, cost around $60 apiece, which I forked out for personally as I was never expecting to be sampled. (AMD asked if I wanted a 200GE sample two days after my retail unit arrived, go figure. I sent that on to Gavin for his 7-year old’s new gaming system.)
AMD vs Intel at ~$60 | ||
AMD Athlon 200GE |
Intel Pentium Gold G5400 |
|
Cores / Threads | 2 / 4 | 2 / 4 |
Microarchitecture | Zen | Coffee Lake |
Motherboards | X470, X370, B450 B350, A320, A300 |
Z390, Z370, Q370 h470, B360, h410 |
CPU Frequency | 3.2 GHz | 3.7 GHz |
L2 Cache | 512 KB/core | 256 KB/core |
L3 Cache | 2 MB / core | 2 MB / core |
Integrated Graphics | Vega 3 192 SPs |
UHD 610 12 EUs (96 ALUs) |
DDR4 Support | DDR4-2933 | DDR4-2666 |
GPU Frequency | Up to 1000 MHz | 350-1050 MHz |
TDP | 35 W | 54 W (2-core die version) 58 W (4-core die version)* |
Price | $55 (SRP) | $64 (1k/u) |
* Intel harvests both 2+2 and 4+2 dies to make G5400 parts.![]() |
When we stack up the two processors side by side, it gets interesting. Both are dual core, quad thread parts. The Intel processor has the frequency advantage, running at 3.7 GHz compared to the 3.2 GHz of AMD, but the AMD has beefier Vega 3 integrated graphics compared to the UHD 610 (GT1) graphics of the Intel chip. One sore point might be the TDP, where the AMD chip has a rating of 35W and the Intel chip is rated at 58W, however as we’ll see in the review, neither of them come close to those values.
Tackling the budget end of the market is fun. I’ve been a long-time advocate for budget builders to build a system piece-by-piece, getting one high-end part at a time rather than smearing a budget across several average parts at once. Under this philosophy, these processors could very well be the start of one of those builds, only costing an average of $60 MSRP. Note that under this philosophy, you might end up with that big graphics card before a processor that can power it. We’re covering those benchmarks as well.
Buy Intel Pentium G5400 on Amazon.com
Buy AMD Athlon 200GE on Amazon.com
Before you click further, place your bets on who you think will win: the Intel Pentium Gold G5400, or the AMD Athlon 200GE?
Latest News: While neither processor is officially overclockable, since we tested for this article it was recently reported that MSI motherboards with certain BIOS versions will allow users to overclock the 200GE to ~3.9 GHz. I’ve asked Gavin to contribute, and he managed a nice 3.9 GHz over the 3.2 GHz base clock. Head over to page 21 for the details.
Pages In This Review
- Analysis and Competition
- Test Bed and Setup
- 2018 and 2019 Benchmark Suite
- CPU Performance: System Tests
- CPU Performance: Rendering Tests
- CPU Performance: Office Tests
- CPU Performance: Encoding Tests
- CPU Performance: Legacy Tests
- Gaming: Integrated Graphics
- Gaming: World of Tanks enCore
- Gaming: Final Fantasy XV
- Gaming: Shadow of War
- Gaming: Civilization 6
- Gaming: Ashes Classic
- Gaming: Strange Brigade
- Gaming: Grand Theft Auto V
- Gaming: Far Cry 5
- Gaming: Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Gaming: F1 2018
- Power Consumption
- Overclocking
- Conclusions and Final Words
Test Bed and Setup
The $60 CPU QuestionTest Bed and SetupOur New Testing Suite for 2018 and 2019CPU Performance: System TestsCPU Performance: Rendering TestsCPU Performance: Office TestsCPU Performance: Encoding TestsCPU Performance: Legacy TestsGaming: Integrated GraphicsGaming: World of Tanks enCoreGaming: Final Fantasy XVGaming: Shadow of WarGaming: Civilization 6 (DX12)Gaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)Gaming: Strange Brigade (DX12, Vulkan)Gaming: Grand Theft Auto VGaming: Far Cry 5Gaming: Shadow of the Tomb Raider (DX12)Gaming: F1 2018Power Consumption: TDP Doesn’t MatterOverclocking on AMD Athlon 200GEConclusion: Split Strategy
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CPU Performance: System Tests — The $60 CPU Question: AMD Athlon 200GE or Intel Pentium Gold G5400? A Review
by Ian Cutresson January 14, 2019 8:00 AM EST
- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Intel
- Athlon
- Pentium Gold
- 200GE
- G5400
95 Comments
|
95 Comments
The $60 CPU QuestionTest Bed and SetupOur New Testing Suite for 2018 and 2019CPU Performance: System TestsCPU Performance: Rendering TestsCPU Performance: Office TestsCPU Performance: Encoding TestsCPU Performance: Legacy TestsGaming: Integrated GraphicsGaming: World of Tanks enCoreGaming: Final Fantasy XVGaming: Shadow of WarGaming: Civilization 6 (DX12)Gaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)Gaming: Strange Brigade (DX12, Vulkan)Gaming: Grand Theft Auto VGaming: Far Cry 5Gaming: Shadow of the Tomb Raider (DX12)Gaming: F1 2018Power Consumption: TDP Doesn’t MatterOverclocking on AMD Athlon 200GEConclusion: Split Strategy
Our System Test section focuses significantly on real-world testing, user experience, with a slight nod to throughput. In this section we cover application loading time, image processing, simple scientific physics, emulation, neural simulation, optimized compute, and 3D model development, with a combination of readily available and custom software. For some of these tests, the bigger suites such as PCMark do cover them (we publish those values in our office section), although multiple perspectives is always beneficial. In all our tests we will explain in-depth what is being tested, and how we are testing.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Application Load: GIMP 2.10.4
One of the most important aspects about user experience and workflow is how fast does a system respond. A good test of this is to see how long it takes for an application to load. Most applications these days, when on an SSD, load fairly instantly, however some office tools require asset pre-loading before being available. Most operating systems employ caching as well, so when certain software is loaded repeatedly (web browser, office tools), then can be initialized much quicker.
In our last suite, we tested how long it took to load a large PDF in Adobe Acrobat. Unfortunately this test was a nightmare to program for, and didn’t transfer over to Win10 RS3 easily. In the meantime we discovered an application that can automate this test, and we put it up against GIMP, a popular free open-source online photo editing tool, and the major alternative to Adobe Photoshop. We set it to load a large 50MB design template, and perform the load 10 times with 10 seconds in-between each. Due to caching, the first 3-5 results are often slower than the rest, and time to cache can be inconsistent, we take the average of the last five results to show CPU processing on cached loading.
As a single threaded test, application loading is a key part of the user experience. Unfortunately the AMD 200GE is 21% slower in this case.
FCAT: Image Processing
The FCAT software was developed to help detect microstuttering, dropped frames, and run frames in graphics benchmarks when two accelerators were paired together to render a scene. Due to game engines and graphics drivers, not all GPU combinations performed ideally, which led to this software fixing colors to each rendered frame and dynamic raw recording of the data using a video capture device.
The FCAT software takes that recorded video, which in our case is 90 seconds of a 1440p run of Rise of the Tomb Raider, and processes that color data into frame time data so the system can plot an ‘observed’ frame rate, and correlate that to the power consumption of the accelerators. This test, by virtue of how quickly it was put together, is single threaded. We run the process and report the time to completion.
In a similar light, the single threaded nature of this test shines on an AMD processor that is 18.6% slower than the Intel competition.
3D Particle Movement v2.1: Brownian Motion
Our 3DPM test is a custom built benchmark designed to simulate six different particle movement algorithms of points in a 3D space. The algorithms were developed as part of my PhD., and while ultimately perform best on a GPU, provide a good idea on how instruction streams are interpreted by different microarchitectures.
A key part of the algorithms is the random number generation – we use relatively fast generation which ends up implementing dependency chains in the code. The upgrade over the naïve first version of this code solved for false sharing in the caches, a major bottleneck. We are also looking at AVX2 and AVX512 versions of this benchmark for future reviews.
For this test, we run a stock particle set over the six algorithms for 20 seconds apiece, with 10 second pauses, and report the total rate of particle movement, in millions of operations (movements) per second. We have a non-AVX version and an AVX version, with the latter implementing AVX512 and AVX2 where possible.
3DPM v2.1 can be downloaded from our server: 3DPMv2.1.rar (13.0 MB)
For pure unoptimized throughput, both processors are similar in the 3DPM test.
But if we crank on the tuned AVX code, the AMD 200GE scores a big win. On the Pentium, the different code path had almost zero effect, with less than a 10% increase in performance, but the 200GE went up by a good 60% by comparison.
Dolphin 5.0: Console Emulation
One of the popular requested tests in our suite is to do with console emulation. Being able to pick up a game from an older system and run it as expected depends on the overhead of the emulator: it takes a significantly more powerful x86 system to be able to accurately emulate an older non-x86 console, especially if code for that console was made to abuse certain physical bugs in the hardware.
For our test, we use the popular Dolphin emulation software, and run a compute project through it to determine how close to a standard console system our processors can emulate. In this test, a Nintendo Wii would take around 1050 seconds.
The latest version of Dolphin can be downloaded from https://dolphin-emu. org/
Our emulation test has always been a strong performer for Intel CPUs.
DigiCortex 1.20: Sea Slug Brain Simulation
This benchmark was originally designed for simulation and visualization of neuron and synapse activity, as is commonly found in the brain. The software comes with a variety of benchmark modes, and we take the small benchmark which runs a 32k neuron / 1.8B synapse simulation, equivalent to a Sea Slug.
We report the results as the ability to simulate the data as a fraction of real-time, so anything above a ‘one’ is suitable for real-time work. Out of the two modes, a ‘non-firing’ mode which is DRAM heavy and a ‘firing’ mode which has CPU work, we choose the latter. Despite this, the benchmark is still affected by DRAM speed a fair amount.
DigiCortex can be downloaded from http://www.digicortex.net/
On this more memory limited test, the official supported frequency of the 200GE comes into play, and it scores 37% more than the Intel chip.
y-Cruncher v0.7.6: Microarchitecture Optimized Compute
I’ve known about y-Cruncher for a while, as a tool to help compute various mathematical constants, but it wasn’t until I began talking with its developer, Alex Yee, a researcher from NWU and now software optimization developer, that I realized that he has optimized the software like crazy to get the best performance. Naturally, any simulation that can take 20+ days can benefit from a 1% performance increase! Alex started y-cruncher as a high-school project, but it is now at a state where Alex is keeping it up to date to take advantage of the latest instruction sets before they are even made available in hardware.
For our test we run y-cruncher v0.7.6 through all the different optimized variants of the binary, single threaded and multi-threaded, including the AVX-512 optimized binaries. The test is to calculate 250m digits of Pi, and we use the single threaded and multi-threaded versions of this test.
Users can download y-cruncher from Alex’s website: http://www. numberworld.org/y-cruncher/
For our second AVX optimized test, AMD again scores a win. It would appear that the Pentium chips from Intel do not seem to be implementing the performance uplifts we see with the Core models.
Agisoft Photoscan 1.3.3: 2D Image to 3D Model Conversion
One of the ISVs that we have worked with for a number of years is Agisoft, who develop software called PhotoScan that transforms a number of 2D images into a 3D model. This is an important tool in model development and archiving, and relies on a number of single threaded and multi-threaded algorithms to go from one side of the computation to the other.
In our test, we take v1.3.3 of the software with a good sized data set of 84 x 18 megapixel photos and push it through a reasonably fast variant of the algorithms, but is still more stringent than our 2017 test. We report the total time to complete the process.
Agisoft’s Photoscan website can be found here: http://www.