Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part I: First Encounter
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 4, 2005 2:44 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Multitasking Scenario 2: File Compression
For our next test, we simulated what would happen if we performed two disk intensive tasks at the same time: zipping a file while importing a 260MB PST file into Outlook 2003.
We ran the same Firefox and iTunes tasks from the last test again, and then did the following:
1) Open Outlook.
2) Start importing 260MB PST.
3) Start WinRAR.
4) Archive 130MB test file.
WinRAR remained the application in focus during this test.
Here, we looked at two metrics: how long it took WinRAR to compress our test file, and how many emails were imported into Outlook during the time WinRAR was archiving. Let's have a look at the results:
Here, we see that all of the CPUs performed relatively similar to one another, but now let's talk about how many emails were imported. The non-HT Pentium 4 imported around 500 emails, while the HT P4 EE imported around 1700 emails by the time WinRAR was done. Neither of those are even close to the performance of the dual core chips, which each imported over 3000 emails in the same 40 seconds. The single core Athlon 64 FX-55 also only imported around 400 emails.
Our second test shows us that the performance of a dual core solution comes in all shapes and sizes. In this case, our foreground task took the same amount of time in almost all cases, but what was done in the background varied significantly.
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hosto - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
#110 - did you notice better performance on the p4 that you used to have? because on single instance of firefox, the amd chips blow the p4's away....yet, when i have multiple panes open with my a64 it chugs quite nastily if there is flash content. Is there some way that macromedia have optimised the flash player for the P4 for firefox? i wonder if the same slowdowns would be noticeable with internet explorer, or if it is specific to the player in firefox/mozilla?xsilver - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
#106I hope you mean in multithreaded apps, as has been said many times before... single threaded apps run the SAME, therefore no benchies were included
#108
So true --- its the only reason why I wish I still had my p4HT over the amd64
xsilver - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
ANAND ... for your gaming benchmarks I recommend a scattering of commonly used programs1) the lot of antivirus, trillian, firefox, spyware running in background
2) gaming related stuff like teamspeak or an audio cd playing in the background (to drown out the crappy game music :)
any other gaming related stuff would be good too....
if dual core proves itself, there should be no performance drop, whereas the single core will drop somewhat
hosto - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
thats funny the comment about the flash going slowly in firefox on the AMD processors in the benchmark..ive noticed the same on my athlon64 3200+ that i cannot have too many flash sites opening without it chugging.sprockkets - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
this would be funny, but if simply having another core helps out with responsiveness and nothing else, I'm getting the dual VIA C3 mini-itx board hahahahaha!OK, not dual core, but hell, it's still small enough and they take only 7w each.
ksteele - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
I would like to see some "apple to apple" benchmarks by removing the clock speed disparities.Pentium D 820 2.8Ghz versus Pentium 4 520 2.8Ghz
Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz versus Pentium 4 530 3.0Ghx
Pentium D 840 3.2Ghz versus Pentium 4 540 3.2Ghz
This will allow us to see the true benefit of dual cores without the speed differences.
mino - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
sorry for some typpo'smino - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
#101 and some othersYou'are mistaken, Inquirer is NOT to be compared to AT. Is is solely news/romours/opinions site and THAT IS THEY ARE BEST AT ! The practical(not theoretical as at CNN...)non-existence of censorship makes them what they are.
One thing for sure: they make biased and wrong stance against AT on this, but this is what they do almost all the time.
The beauty of The Inquirer's approach to journalism is that it let's the reader choose which report is to be taken seriously. They even state it in articles regularly.
I just hate those juornalists that usurp the right for correct judgement just for themselves.
Just to make clear: I'm in no relation to The Inq. except readeship.
To Anand:
This is one of the best articles(at all) a have read so far. And it looks like it's going to be even better when it's completed. Keep up the good work.
To topic: One thing should be noted. That is that the VERY poor performance at the singlecore(AMD & intel HT off) scenarios is NOT to be atributed to their inferiority but mostly to the incredibly crappy windows scheduler. Availability of multiple CPU's to it just partly hides its inefficiencies. Let's face it. HT is mainly a Windows baby. No way Intel would make the trouble developing it *NIX system were the main ones.
ksteele - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
I noticed the dual core's have 1MB L2 cache. Does this mean they are 5xx based? Do they support Intel EM64T, XD Bit and Enhanced Intel Speedstep Technology?Gatak - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
#83 So you do not think that a game can utilize two CPUs? Run physics and I/O on one Core and render 3D and textures on the other.Also, Even though a game is single threaded, you still have the OS in the background, you have the video and audio card drivers running in separate threads. harddisk I/O and interrupt handling is also spread out on multiple cores.