AMD Sempron 2500+ compare Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz CPU

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CPU Core Details

CPU Codename	Thoroughbred (Model 8)	Northwood
MoBo Socket	Socket 462/Socket A	Socket 478/Socket N
Notebook CPU	no	no
Release Date	28 Jul 2004	03 Nov 2003
CPU Link	GD Link	GD Link
Approved

CPU Technical Specifications

CPU Cores	1	1
Clock Speed	1.75 GHz	3.2 GHz
Turbo Frequency	-	-
Max TDP	62 W	92 W
Lithography	130 nm	130 nm
Bit Width	-	-
Virtualization Technology	no	no

CPU Cache and Memory

L1 Cache Size	128 KB	8 KB
L2 Cache Size	256 KB	512 KB
L3 Cache Size	-	-
Memory Types
ECC Memory Support	no	no

CPU Graphics

Integrated Graphics	no		no

CPU Mini Review

Mini Review	Sempron has been the marketing name used by AMD for several different budget desktop CPUs, using several different technologies and CPU socket formats. The Sempron replaced the AMD Duron processor and competes against Intel's Celeron series of processors. AMD coined the name from the Latin semper, which means always, to suggest the Sempron is suitable for daily use, practical, and part of everyday life.	The Pentium 4 brand refers to Intel's line of single-core desktop and laptop central processing units (CPUs) introduced on November 20, 2000 and shipped through August 8, 2008. They had the 7th-generation x86 microarchitecture, called NetBurst, which was the company's first all-new design since introduction of P6 microarchitecture of the Pentium Pro CPUs in 1995. NetBurst differed from the preceding P6 (Pentium III, II, etc.) by featuring a very deep instruction pipeline to achieve very high clock speeds (up to 3.8 GHz) limited only by TDPs reaching up to 115 W in 3.4 GHz ?3.8 GHz Prescott and Prescotts 2M cores . In 2004, the initial 32-bit x86 instruction set of the Pentium 4 microprocessors was extended by the 64-bit x86-64 set.

Gaming Performance Comparison

In terms of overall gaming performance, the Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz is marginally better than the AMD Sempron 2500+ when it comes to running the latest games. This also means it will be less likely to bottleneck more powerful GPUs, allowing them to achieve more of their gaming performance potential.

Both the Sempron 2500+ and the Pentium 4 3.2GHz were released at the same time, so are likely to be quite similar.

Both CPUs exhibit very poor performance, so rather than upgrading from one to the other you should consider looking at more powerful CPUs. Neither of these will be able to run the latest games in any playable way.

{ The Sempron 2500+ and the Pentium 4 3.2GHz both have 1 cores, and so are quite likely to struggle with the latest games, or at least bottleneck high-end graphics cards when running them. With a decent accompanying GPU, theSempron 2500+ and the Pentium 4 3.2GHz may still be able to run slightly older games fairly effectively.

More important for gaming than the number of cores and threads is the clock rate. Problematically, unless the two CPUs are from the same family, this can only serve as a general guide and nothing like an exact comparison, because the clock cycles per instruction (CPI) will vary so much.

The Sempron 2500+ and Pentium 4 3.2GHz are not from the same family of CPUs, so their clock speeds are by no means directly comparable. Bear in mind, then, that while the Pentium 4 3.2GHz has a 1.45 GHz faster frequency, this is not always an indicator that it will be superior in performance, despite frequency being crucial when trying to avoid GPU bottlenecking. In this case, however, the difference is probably a good indicator that the is superior.

Aside from the clock rate, the next-most important CPU features for PC game performance are L2 and L3 cache size. Faster than RAM, the more cache available, the more data that can be stored for lightning-fast retrieval. L1 Cache is not usually an issue anymore for gaming, with most high-end CPUs eking out about the same L1 performance, and L2 is more important than L3 - but L3 is still important if you want to reach the highest levels of performance. Bear in mind that although it is better to have a larger cache, the larger it is, the higher the latency, so a balance has to be struck.

The Pentium 4 3.2GHz has a 256 KB bigger L2 cache than the Sempron 2500+, but neither of the CPUs have L3 caches, so the Pentium 4 3.2GHz wins out in this area with its larger L2 cache.

The maximum Thermal Design Power is the power in Watts that the CPU will consume in the worst case scenario. The lithography is the semiconductor manufacturing technology being used to create the CPU - the smaller this is, the more transistors that can be fit into the CPU, and the closer the connections. For both the lithography and the TDP, it is the lower the better, because a lower number means a lower amount of power is necessary to run the CPU, and consequently a lower amount of heat is produced.