Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part II: A Deeper Look
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 6, 2005 12:23 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Business Application Performance
Business Winstone 2004
Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:
- Microsoft Access 2002
- Microsoft Excel 2002
- Microsoft FrontPage 2002
- Microsoft Outlook 2002
- Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
- Microsoft Project 2002
- Microsoft Word 2002
- Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
- WinZip 8.1
The Pentium 4 and Pentium D perform quite similarly here, but the Athlon 64 3500+ is obviously the strongest performer out of the three when it comes to single threaded business applications.
Office Productivity SYSMark 2004
SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:
"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."
The next test is Document Creation performance:
"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."
The final test in our Office Productivity suite is Data Analysis, which BAPCo describes as:
"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."
SYSMark paints a much more evenly matched picture between AMD and Intel in the Office Productivity suite. What's interesting is that even AMD recommends SYSMark 2004 as the best overall system performance test for multi-core desktop CPUs.
Business Winstone 2004 includes a multitasking test as a part of its suite, which does the following:
"This test uses the same applications as the Business Winstone test, but runs some of them in the background. The test has three segments: in the first, files copy in the background while the script runs Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer in the foreground. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the second segment. In that segment, Excel and Word operations run in the foreground while WinZip archives in the background. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the third segment. In that segment, Norton AntiVirus runs a virus check in the background while Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Access, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft FrontPage, and WinZip operations run in the foreground."
The multitasking tests show the Pentium D 2.8GHz and the Athlon 64 3500+ as equal competitors, with AMD winning the first two tests and Intel winning the last. This just goes to show you that not all multitasking will be immediately faster on a dual core chip.
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Umbra55 - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
Why do you still use the nForce 4 reference board for AMD tests? The real nForce 4 boards exist since over a quarter now and perform 10% better than the reference board. You also pretend to compare CPUs with similar price. Wouldn't it make more sense to compare combinations of mobo/CPU/memory of similar price?This is not a fair comparison (Or is it the intention?)
Umbra55 - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
yde - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
In this atricle, I was unable to find cache information about the AMD chip (usually equipped with a 512 KB L2 cache).To my point of view, in multiple threads scenario, the cache size may have dramatic influence and may explain several handicaps in the benchmarks. It would be nice to know what happens with a 1MB L2 cache Athlon 64 to keep things equal.
AMD chip has shorter branch prediction lines and seem quite well equipped for multitasking in theory, so why is it appearing so weak?
snorre - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
We're still waiting for proper benchmarks comparing dual core Smithfield with dual Opteron/Xeon. When will we see this?Comparing dual core CPUs with single core CPUs is like comparing apples and oranges, totally meaningless.
Calin - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
Thanks for the minimum frame rate comparison! And maybe you should not use so many flash-heavy pages, especially considering that you already told us that Athlon64 is much slower in Flash than Pentium4...Looks like Pentium D is a better choice in more ways than the Prescott is
xsilver - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
The multitasking gaming analysis combined with HT and NCQ was very insightful, almost pioneering...and with dual core AMD's people have to remember that the whole architecture is designed differently, and hence the possible suprises in tasks that the pentium D may not perform well on
but the power consumption advantage on amd is mighty tempting as amd will be the cpu that just keeps on saving -- with power bills that is
Azsen - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
Hi Anand,I was thinking, seeing most games are single-threaded you might like to try and benchmark this scenario on the dual core machine:
Set all the processes including operating system processes and other background processes to run on CPU 0 (first core). Then set the particular game to run on CPU 1 (second core). Have nothing else but the game running on CPU 1. This should dedicate a whole CPU core to the game for maximum performance in theory. I believe you can set the affinity in the task manager or use a batch file to do it.
Then run a Doom3 benchmark or HL2 benchmarks to see if the gaming performance is increased by letting the single-threaded game have a whole CPU core with no interuptions.
Would this be feasible to test?
Cheers. :)
AnnoyedGrunt - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
The AMD not competing with the PD 2.8 will be due to price.Remember that AMD will need to sell a 2 core 2.2 GHz processor for about double the price of the single core version (maybe even more if yields are a problem). Therefore, you should expect a dual core 2.2 proc to be closer to $500-600 instead of the ~$300 processors tested here.
This also explains why AMD is focusing on the workstation market first. It's an area where price is typically not as much a factor, and where they are competing with Xeon prices, so it will be much easier for them to sell procs @ the higher prices.
I'm guessing that AMD's desktop dual core procs will start @ 1.6 or 1.8 GHz, and be priced on par with the Intel offerings. I think the overall performance will be similar to the current single core behavior, but now you can have more stuff running.
I currently have an AMD 939 3200+, so I am looking forward to their dual core offerings in a couple years, and hoping my mobo will be compatible. That would be very cool.
Also, I would like to add vote for a WoW test with Teamspeak running in the background as well as an istance if IE or Firefox with tthotbot.
Thanks,
D'oh!
SLIM - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
Hi Anand,Any chance you could give us a little peak at what dual opterons on the nforce pro chipset can do in the same benches that you did in this article.
A configuration something like this:
Opteron 252s clocked at 1.8GHz, 2.2GHz, 2.6GHz
1 GB ECC DDR400
NVIDIA nForce pro motherboard
ATI Radeon X850 XT PCI Express
NCQ enabled HDD (maxline III, 7200.8, etc)
I looked through all the old articles I could find, but most seemed to contain only server oriented benches. I think that kind of article would be very enlightening as to the future performance of dual core athlons (probably within a couple percent)... maybe help put to rest some of the questions a lot of us have about waiting for amd dualcore, intel dualcore or just overclocking the heck out of a venice a64.
SLIM
Jep4444 - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
SSE3 does almost nothing for the Venice which is barely faster than the Winchester(Xbit Labs benchmarked it already)While Anandtech said the dual cored A64s wouldn't compete with the Pentium D in encoding, unless they actually have dual cored A64s which they can't show us, i'd be willing to argue with that. Encoding is one of those things thats largely affected by Hyper-Threading and the Pentium D loses hyper threading. When the A64 goes dual, its performance increase will be larger than Intels.