AMD Venice v. San Diego Core Performance

Conclusion:

Thanks to the 1MB cache in the San Diego, the extra cache proves to be beneficial in certain tasks, as shown in the Linux compiling process. The performance advantage is close to 10% in compiling LAME. In other benchmarks, such as Doom 3, the advantage of San Diego is roughly 5% at best. For Doom 3, we saw a 3-5% performance increase from the Venice to the San Diego, though as the quality gets higher, the performance increase diminished to less than 2%. However, this is partially due to the graphic card used to perform this benchmark. For archiving and extraction, the results were very interesting. Venice performed better than San Diego across the board, and it isn’t too difficult to conclude that the extra speed offered no advantage in terms of file archiving and extraction; hard drive RPM and cache are the influencing factors that determine the speed of these actions. When compiling using GCC was really the only benchmark that decisively showed the San Diego as the clear winner over the Venice. This means the San Diego is faster than Venice at compiling LAME by roughly 10%. On with the Opstone benchmarks, the San Diego and Venice ran neck and neck, and the San Diego offered less than 5% of an advantage over the Venice. In conclusion, for average users, we found that the San Diego offers an average of 3% higher return than its counter part, Venice, when running at the same clock speed. With the pricing of the cheapest San Diego around $330, Venice 3200+ around $195, and Venice 3500+ around $275, it comes down to whether paying the premium price of the San Diego is justified. The AMD San Diego is one hell of a screamer for single-core setups, but with its high price tag, the small performance increase isn't truly justified unless you'll be coding and compiling all day or a similar CPU intensive process.