CPU Performance: Office Tests

The Office test suite is designed to focus around more industry standard tests that focus on office workflows, system meetings, some synthetics, but we also bundle compiler performance in with this section. For users that have to evaluate hardware in general, these are usually the benchmarks that most consider.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

3DMark Physics: In-Game Physics Compute

Alongside PCMark is 3DMark, Futuremark’s (UL’s) gaming test suite. Each gaming tests consists of one or two GPU heavy scenes, along with a physics test that is indicative of when the test was written and the platform it is aimed at. The main overriding tests, in order of complexity, are Ice Storm, Cloud Gate, Sky Diver, Fire Strike, and Time Spy.

Some of the subtests offer variants, such as Ice Storm Unlimited, which is aimed at mobile platforms with an off-screen rendering, or Fire Strike Ultra which is aimed at high-end 4K systems with lots of the added features turned on. Time Spy also currently has an AVX-512 mode (which we may be using in the future).

3DMark Physics - Ice Storm Unlimited3DMark Physics - Cloud Gate3DMark Physics - Sky Diver

In simpler titles like Ice Storm, having that high frequency causes the 9990XE to be the best physics calculator for this test that we have.

GeekBench4: Synthetics

A common tool for cross-platform testing between mobile, PC, and Mac, GeekBench 4 is an ultimate exercise in synthetic testing across a range of algorithms looking for peak throughput. Tests include encryption, compression, fast Fourier transform, memory operations, n-body physics, matrix operations, histogram manipulation, and HTML parsing.

I’m including this test due to popular demand, although the results do come across as overly synthetic, and a lot of users often put a lot of weight behind the test due to the fact that it is compiled across different platforms (although with different compilers).

We record the main subtest scores (Crypto, Integer, Floating Point, Memory) in our benchmark database, but for the review we post the overall single and multi-threaded results.

Geekbench 4 - ST OverallGeekbench 4 - MT Overall

CPU Performance: System Tests CPU Performance: Web and Legacy Tests
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  • Sivar - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link

    Why such an angry statement?
    14 is a very respectable number of cores. 14 at 5GHz is a world exclusive.
    I wouldn't even call this a product -- more of a hand-picked specialty part auction, which is perfectly reasonable (if uncommon) for any manufacturer to do. The fact that the parts sold indicates the demand is there. Why ignore the demand?
  • Spunjji - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link

    The fact that they sold very few of them indicates that the demand is barely there.
  • FunBunny2 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link

    "Stories of companies spending 10s of millions to implement line-of-sight microwave transmitter towers to shave off 3 milliseconds from the latency time is a story I once heard. "

    There was reporting, mainstream source (Lewis: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/b... that a broker(s) installed a fiber line from the Chicago office to an exchange in NJ.

    “It needed its burrow to be straight, maybe the most insistently straight path ever dug into the earth. It needed to connect a data centre on the South Side of Chicago to a stock exchange in northern New Jersey. Above all, apparently, it had to be secret," Mr Lewis said.
  • bji - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link

    I call BS on that story. Why would you spend hundreds of millions (it must have cost at least that right?) to dig a straight 800+ mile tunnel between Chicago and NYC to get a 13 ms latency just so you could be destroyed by offices in NYC with 5 ms latency. Makes no sense. Your only choice is to move physically close to the source, if lowest latency is the winner then that's the only way to get it and be competitive.

    Authors happily embellish existing stories, misrepresent details, and just plain old make sh** up to sell books. And then news outlets happily garbage-in, garbage-out these stories to get hits. I'm pretty sure that's what happened with that "story".
  • eek2121 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link

    Companies have done it. Hell years ago I INTERVIEWED with a company that did it. It would blow your mind to find out what the financial folks will do to accelerate trading. A large portion of stock market trades are automated and driven by machine learning or predictive algorithms. How do I know, that position I interviewed for years ago (2003) was for a software developer for such an algorithm. I didn't get the job, because I didn't have the skills they were looking for at the time, but we did have a very interesting conversation about how their platform worked. It's fascinating how finance pushes everything forward.
  • FunBunny2 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link

    " It would blow your mind to find out what the financial folks will do to accelerate trading."
    yes, yes it would - here: https://www.marketplace.org/2019/10/07/fight-nyse-...
  • bji - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link

    Yes, I believe that those companies probably often spend lots of money to buy competitive advantages. I am simply stating that they'd not be buying a competitive advantage here (since the real competition is based in NYC had has an insurmountable advantage - the laws of physics not letting signals travel between Chicago and Wall St. faster than 13 ms) so they wouldn't spend the money. They would spend money buying an actual competitive advantage, i.e. offices in NYC.
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link

    > Why would you spend hundreds of millions (it must have cost at least that right?) to dig a straight 800+ mile tunnel between Chicago and NYC to get a 13 ms latency just so you could be destroyed by offices in NYC with 5 ms latency. Makes no sense. Your only choice is to move physically close to the source, if lowest latency is the winner then that's the only way to get it and be competitive.

    When something doesn't seem to make sense, maybe the error is in your understanding of the situation. Did you ever consider that there are financial markets outside of NYC, and that some people might be trading between markets, or using signals from one market to inform trades in others?
  • Joel Busch - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link

    This one is easy to answer, because there are two stock exchanges in play. NYSE in New York and CHX in Chicago. If you can send information from one exchange to the other quicker than others then you have an opportunity for arbitrage.

    One of my professors is Ankit Singla, he works on c-speed networking, he cited this paper in class https://doi.org/10.1111/fire.12036

    They say for example:

    "Our analysis of the market data confirms that as of April 2010, the fastest communication route connecting the Chicago futures markets to the New Jersey equity markets was through fiber optic lines that allowed equity prices to respond within 7.25–7.95 ms of a price change in Chicago (Adler, 2012). In Au-gust of 2010, Spread Networks introduced a new fiber optic line that was shorter than the pre-existing routes and used lower latency equipment. This technology reduced Chicago–New Jersey latency to approximately 6.65 ms (Steiner, 2010; Adler,2012)."

    I don't have the time to read the whole paper right now, I'll just trust my professor here. If there is actually something wrong with their methodology then I think the world would like to hear it.
  • rahvin - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link

    <<“It needed its burrow to be straight, maybe the most insistently straight path ever dug into the earth. It needed to connect a data centre on the South Side of Chicago to a stock exchange in northern New Jersey. Above all, apparently, it had to be secret," Mr Lewis said>>

    That's just a bunch of hogwash. You couldn't dig a straight line from Chicago to Jersey. It's just fancy sounding hogwash meant to convince those without the logic or background to see it for the hogwash it is. It's no more true than grimm's fairy tales.

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