ServerWorks HEsl: DDR bandwidth without DDR SDRAM

Click Here for a description of Content Creation Winstone 2001

Content Creation Winstone 2001 paints a slightly different picture. The Apollo Pro 133A falls below the rest of the contenders here, the only difference between this benchmark and the previous one is that there is a stronger focus on memory bandwidth because of the nature of these "content creation" applications in comparison to business applications.

Because of this the lower latency PC133 SDRAM isn't enough to keep the Apollo Pro 133A up towards the top of the charts mainly because the i840's dual channel RDRAM and the Pro 266's DDR SDRAM offer a considerable improvement in terms of bandwidth.

The ServerSet III HEsl once again proves that the best of both worlds (low latency + high bandwidth) is enough to propel it to the top of the charts. However if you will notice, the difference between the highest performing HEsl and the i840/Pro 266 is negligible. The only tangible performance increase is seen when compared to the Apollo Pro 133A. It seems as if 1.06GB/s of memory bandwidth isn't enough for dual processors.

We should all be quite familiar with SYSMark 2000 by now. The benchmark script runs no more than a single application at once and is clearly not a benchmark that can be used to measure multiprocessor performance or test for memory bandwidth utilization as a good deal of the benchmarks aren't incredibly bandwidth intensive.

The only real performance difference we see here, again, lies with the 133A but even it is only 2% slower than the fastest performers in this test.

Now that we've gotten those initial tests out of the way, let's look at some more multiprocessor oriented benchmarks and some more memory bandwidth stressors.