Development Workstation Performance

One test we've always been asked to run is a Visual Studio/Visual C compile test, however we never had a project large enough to compile. Sitting around talking about Athlon 64 testing one day we came up with the idea of using the publicly available Quake 3 source code as a compile test for CPUs, and thus for this next test we timed how long it took for the Quake 3 source code to compile.

This compile test should be a relatively good indicator of overall compile performance, which will be very useful for those of you that have very large projects that can take countless minutes to well over an hour to compile.

These results shouldn't be too surprising as compilers are very branch-happy applications, which definitely penalize long pipelines like the Pentium 4's. There will be more optimized compilers available for the Pentium 4 in the future that may exploit multithreaded compiling with the generation of helper threads to show performance improvements courtesy of Hyper Threading, but for now if you want a good development workstation - AMD is the way to go.

Gaming Performance DivX Encoding
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  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    Anand runs the Content Creation benchmark without the bugfix patch?!?! WTF? Like that's fair... Without the patch, it doesn't use SSE properly with the Athlons...

    And the FX 51 benches are completely bogus, because he used an nForce3-based motherboard.

    They've got issues, and the Via boards outperform
    them significantly. Hello? Anand?

    http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2003q3/athlon64...

    "Notice here the contrast between the Athlon 64 FX with the K8T800 and with the nForce3 Pro. With the K8T800, the Athlon 64 FX is arguably the fastest system overall in the viewperf suite. The nForce3 Pro, however, seems to limit performance quite a bit."
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    #9 Which planet are you on?
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    Great news for the Linux users:-) I'm seeing a lot of Windows users switching to Linux and using transcode or cinelerra:-)
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    Good thing you are not biased at atll, #4
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    Eat it #6 amd fan boy
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    yes, you're right #4, they're biased. just like all the other tech sites praising the new amd chip. they're obviously all wrong.... go away
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    Still can't decide. Leaning Intel... I've had better experience with Intel.. but next year When XP64 shipes......
    Guess I will stick with my trusty 386..
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    BIASED BIASED BIASED BIASED BIASED

    The P4EE whoops new AMDs chip and you say is "The Pentium 4 EE manages to regain some lost ground for Intel, but not enough". YOU ARE CRAZY!!!!!! The Prescott will DEMOLISH AMD once and for all. Btw, get some more benchmarks. Q3 and UT2003 are OLD GAMES using DX8. Run Battlefield and other memory/cpu entensive games.

    AMD fanboys can't cry about their chip is slower but cheaper either.

    Worst biased site ever. Just because they kissed your butt and showed you the cpu's a year in advance you shove your nose up AMDs socket.

    BIASED BIASED BIASED BIASED BIASED
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    What people tend to forget is that 3200+ is the INITIAL speed from the first batch of CPU's. As with the XP the speed will increase rather rapidly as well as die-quality and tweaks/performance fixes. Athlon XP debuted at what, 1500+ (?) and now ends at 3200+. The A64 going to 90nm will yield some neat increases in available speeds (4800+ anyone?) ;)
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    wtf no 640x480 game benchmarks?

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