[ Thanks to Phoronix for this link.
]
“A few months ago, AMD refined their Socket 939 line of
processors with the E3 and E4 revisions, codenamed Venice and San
Diego, respectively, to replace the D0 Winchester. The Venice and
San Diego features the improved memory controller, and most
notably, AMD doubled the amount of L2 Cache for the San Diego
compared to its Venice counterpart. The San Diego immediately
attracted large attention among the enthusiast crowd for its
enormous L2 cache; in fact, the Athlon 64 FX-57 is based upon the
San Diego. While the San Diego looks great on paper, premium
performance also comes at a premium price, and the cheapest San
Diego, the 3700+ at 2.2GHz, runs around $330, while a Venice 3500+
running at the same clock speed is $275, and the cheaper versions
of Venice 3200+ or 3000+ often overclock easily to 2.6GHz and
beyond. Is the price premium justified? Does the extra 1MB L2 Cache
help that much in real world performance? Just how well do these
two cores compare clock-for-clock? In this review we will be
running two of these CPUs at 2.0, 2.2, and 2.6GHz to see the
performance difference between the two AMD cores…”