The Core 2 Quad Q8400: Intel's $183 Phenom II 940 Competitor
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 7, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Microsoft Excel 2007
Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.
PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive.
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
Both our PAR2 and WinRAR tests have AMD in the lead - real applications and a real performance advantage.
WinRAR - Archive Creation
Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:
WinRAR is a clear win for the 940. The Q8400 is hurt by its lack of cache and lower clock speed in this case.
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erple2 - Saturday, May 9, 2009 - link
while there may be fewer defects per wafer, there are also fewer chips per wafer (about 57% fewer). To take the analogy to the extreme, lets say that AMD makes one chip that consumes the entire wafer, and Intel can make 2. If there is, on average, 1 defect per wafer for AMD and 5 defects per wafer for Intel, AMD has zero good chips per wafer, and Intel has (on average), 2 good chips per 5 wafers. That example is horribly contrived, sure, but I used it to show that even having a better process (fewer defects per wafer) doesn't guarantee a good result if the size of the chunks you use on the wafer is significantly larger - AMD's can fit quite a few less per wafer (about half?).erple2 - Saturday, May 9, 2009 - link
arg... edit button... Intel would have 1 good chip per 3 wafers. I assumed 4 defects per wafer, not 5 in the 2/5 ...slayerized - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
You are confusing yield and throughput - they are two different things.8steve8 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
no Virtualization Tech... so no windows 7 virtual PC, no hyper-v...that sucks.
rather go phenom 2, intel e8xxx or q9xxx
ltcommanderdata - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link
I don't think the lack of VT will be a huge issue for the average consumer. The Q8400 is a budget quad core and OEMs will no doubt be bundling Windows 7 Home Premium with it which doesn't support XP Mode anyways. Tech savy buyers who build their own computers with a Q8400 and Professional Edition would notice, but the larger impediment to XP Mode adoption is probably still Microsoft's production edition matrix.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
Very good point, I've updated the conclusion to point out the difference. Honestly it's ridiculous that Intel isn't enabling it on these chips.Take care,
Anand
spazmedia - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
I second this. Just bought a intel box with an E5200 thinking it had VT. Hopefully they will follow AMD's lead.GeorgeH - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
+1No support for Windows 7 XP Mode is the reason I chose AMD over an Intel Q8X00 in the PC I just built.
leomax999 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
Intel has announced vt support for Q8300, E7400, E7500, E5300, E5400.So i dont see any reason why q8400 shouldnt get it.
http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php?shownews=25...">http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php?shownews=25...
GeorgeH - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
Thanks for the link, but to be clear the chips you listed will never support VT.Intel is supposed to be releasing Q8300".1", E7400".1", etc. chips, but unless they change the model number I can only see that leading to mass confusion. Forcing average people to check the S-Spec or MM number against a list to see what they're actually getting is a classic recipe for fail.
Until those updated Intel chips hit the market, AMD will remain the only real choice for budget and midrange quad core.