Windows XP 64-Bit Preview: First Look at Athlon 64 Performance
by Wesley Fink on February 7, 2004 12:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
System and Memory Benchmarks
SiSoft Sandra 2004 64-Bit
The 64-bit
version of Sandra 2004 has been available for a while, but we did not have an Operating System to reliably run with the 64-bit version. Sandra 64-bit runs fine on the XP64 preview.
While Sandra is a Synthetic Benchmark, we were curious to see if there
would be any performance difference in memory, CPU Arithmetic, and Multimedia
benchmarks between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Everything was kept the same; we even used
nVidia drivers close to the same version number. The only difference is Sandra 2004 tests were
run on XP Pro, while Sandra 2004 64-bit tests were run on XP 64-bit Preview
Edition.
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SiSoft Sandra 2004 - Athlon 64 FX51 Performance |
|||
|
|
32-Bit (Windows XP SP1) |
64-Bit (XP64 Preview Edition) |
% Change 32 to 64-bit |
|
Sandra 2004 Standard Buffered |
INT
5722 FLT 5660 |
INT
5910 FLT 5831 |
+3.2% |
|
Sandra 2004 UNBuffered |
INT
2588 FLT
2682 |
INT
2811 FLT
2791 |
+6.3% |
|
Sandra 2004 CPU Arithmetic |
9161 mips 3470/4534 mflops |
10121 mips 3881/4105 mflops |
+10.5% mips -0.2% mflops |
|
Sandra 2004 CPU Multimedia |
INT 16404 FLOAT 21642 |
INT 16598 FLOAT 22869 |
+1% INT +5.7% FLOAT |
The 32-bit
vs. 64-bit results in Sandra are very interesting. Even in this pre-release version of XP64, the
Athlon 64 CPU and Memory Performance is higher than in 32-bit Windows XP. Mips, which is based on ALU tests, is more
than 10% faster, and Integer and Float tests in the Sandra 2004 Multimedia
benchmark is 1% to 6% faster. The only
area without increased performance in 64-bit is the mflops component of the
Arithmetic benchmark. If we look closer,
this benchmark is a combination FPU performance and iSSE2 performance. While Floating Point increases some 11.6% in
the move from XP to XP64 Preview, the Intel SSE2 results decrease by about the
same amount. The net result is
virtually no change in the composite mflops.
We do not know if this is because Intel SSE2 is penalized by 64-bit
operation or whether XP64 and/or Sandra 2004 64-bit benchmark require some
optimizations for 64-bit performance.
Super Pi
Super PI is
very simple - it calculates the value of pi.
In the benchmark you can select the number of placed for calculation,
and we used 2 million places as used in memory tests at AnandTech.
|
Super Pi - Athlon 64 FX51
Performance |
|||
|
|
32-Bit (Windows XP SP1) |
64-Bit (XP64 Preview Edition) |
% Change 32 to 64-bit |
|
Super Pi 2M Places |
88 seconds |
88 seconds |
0% |
As you can
see, Super Pi was exactly the same result in both 32 and 64-bit.
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Jeff7181 - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Very nice. This is reminding me of the Windows 3.1 > Windows 95 switch.PrinceGaz - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Just to add to what I said, it would be beneficial if AnandTech ran all CPU article game tests at 640x480 to reduce the impact of the graphics-card as past reviews have shown that some of them are gfx-card bound.PrinceGaz - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Its clear from those results that uaing an Athlon 64 with a 64-bit O/S will certainly give considerable performance improvements with many applications and perform at least as well in everything else.Equally clear is that the poor gaming results in this test are caused by immature/unoptimised AGP GART chipset and/or graphics-card drivers as all the other tests which weren't dependent on what was sent to the graphics-card showed the A64 doing at least as well as in 32-bit mode and usually somewhat better. Changing from 32-bit to 64-bit mode obviously isn't going to hamper the transfer of data down the AGP/PCI-Express bus (quite the opposite with suitable drivers) so I'd expect games to show similar performance gains to other apps once the drivers are mature.
INTC - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Here is a description of the different modes of AMD64 operations:http://www.lostcircuits.com/cpu/amd_a64fx51/7.shtm...
It looks like WOW is okay but until applications are recompiled for full 64-bit the advantages are absent and there may even be some penalty for "Compatibility" mode as seen in the gaming scores.
It will be interesting to see what Intel will have at IDF in a few weeks.
Pumpkinierre - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
This OS has been written for the a64 which from memory has 3 modes of operation: full64bit, 32bit emulation and something in between. You mention DX-32bit(post #13) so can this OS run in 32bit mode. If so, you could run the games benchmarks using 32bit drivers and Win64. If scores were still the same then the OS would be to blame not the drivers.Still, good to see movement on the 64bit front. I suspect that Intel's recent announcements have something to do with this. Perhaps Win64 is not coded for A64 alone. Nevertheless, it cant but help a64 sales.
tolgae - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Well, nobody seems to mention the fact that many of these apps (games especially) are running under WOW64. It is normal that such losses are happening. The CPU can run 32-bit natively very well, but now applications are going through this extra layer (being "converted" on the fly, in a sense) so that they can run on 64-bit OS. As with everything else about the Windows XP 64-bit, I am sure this will be optimized until the product ships (even after that).mattsaccount - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
The important thing to keep in mind is that this is not the final release of Windows 64 bit, unlike Prescott :) Nobody would use this BETA OS in a production environment.The way I interpret these results is like so. The improvements are real and will still be present when Windows 64 final (whatever it's called) is shipped. The applications with poor performance (i.e. games) will probably improve by the time the OS ships and we should therefore withhold judgement.
raskren - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Wow what a hit in the gaming department! I expected to a see a modest gain in everything, but the tiny boost in 64bit apps and the huge loss in games makes the Prescott look a lot better.Wesley Fink - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Splinter Cell has been added to the Game Benchmark comparison.XP64 uses DirectX 64 and a Direct X 32-bit version. We were told there may be a problem with enabling DirectX 64 in this Preview Edition. We did run DXDiag for 64-bits and checked to make sure DX64 was enabled. We then reran several game benchmarks and got essentially the same results as those posted in this review.
We will be on the lookout for updated graphics drivers and will report what we find.
klah - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
The Nvidia driver is still very slow and buggy. OpenGL actually runs faster in software mode with this driver.http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000257