Athlon 64 X2: New Memory Dividers and Multitasking Performance

Multitasking Office Performance

Our first test is actually the scripted Multitasking Winstone 2004 test. We’ve used this test in the past, and it serves as an excellent example of relatively light general use multitasking performance. The test consists of three parts, all of which are described below:

"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."

We’ve been playing around with multitasking performance tests for several months now, and have found that even scripted tests like the Multitasking Winstone test require a lot of work to get to produce repeatable results. The problem mostly boils down to making sure that all of the tasks executing simultaneously do so in the exact same manner, every single time, across all platforms, CPUs and other configuration changes. Honestly, doing so is very difficult and it often requires far more benchmarking runs than we are used to performing for most of our other tests. But at the end of the day, it is possible to get results that do make some sort of sense, and spending a great deal of time with Multitasking Winstone and our own home-brew tests, we have done just that.

Multitasking Winstone	DDR400	DDR480	% Improvement
Test 1	2.21	2.37	7.2%
Test 2	2.94	3.05	3.7%
Test 3	4.82	4.88	1.2%

The first test proved to be the most impressive out of the bunch, showing a 7.2% increase in performance over stock DDR400. Note that a 7.2% performance advantage is greater than what we’d see when going from an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ to a 4800+.

The second test still produced reasonably good results, showing a 3.7% increase in performance. The third and final test shows that not all situations will yield a tangible performance increase.

Although it is a canned benchmark, Multitasking Winstone 2004 gives us a very good idea of what is to come. But in order to truly find out if higher bandwidth memory is worth it for Athlon 64 X2 owners, we turned to some of our own home-brew multitasking benchmarks.