Kryotech Super G2 Athlon 1.86GHz

Workstation Performance

Although now over two years old, the Dual Processor Inspection Tests that are a part of High-End Winstone 99 are still very useful.  The Dual Processor Inspection Tests are conveniently enough multithreaded tests designed to stress multiprocessor systems.  The tests either use MP versions of software packages, MP centric tests or simply run two threads of a particular process in the application (for example, the Visual C++ test spawns two compile windows).

We figured that the best test for the Super G2 system would be to compare it to the world’s previous fastest x86 platform: the 760MP with dual Athlon MP 1.2GHz processors.

Microstation SE is a CAD/Design package that is very stressful when it comes to x87 FPU calculations allowing the Athlon to do very well.  In spite of this, the overclocked Pentium 4 at 2GHz (an official release to be coming very soon) manages to just edge out the two Athlon MP 1.2s – that’s ignoring the very top bar.

Taking the Super G2 into account provides the realization that a 23% performance improvement over the fastest Pentium 4 platform isn’t a joking matter.  Whether it’s worth the price is another thing, but there’s no question about the performance.

The Photoshop 4 MP benchmark that’s a part of the DP Inspection Tests clearly favors the two Athlon MP processors to the single 1.866GHz Athlon.  There are some situations where there simply will be an advantage to a DP system because of the nature of the tasks at hand, this being one of them. 

For a single processor system the 1.866GHz Super G2 is easily impressive but throwing in the lower cost dual Athlon MP 1.2 system into the equation steals a lot of its thunder.

The Visual C++ 6.0 MP test involves opening two files and initiating two compilation operations simultaneously.  Although the 1.866GHz Super G2 makes an earnest effort it is still unable to topple the performance of the dual Athlon MP 1.2.  As far as other single processor systems go, nothing is able to touch the Super G2. 

Overall, when you factor in the incredible performance of the system under Microstation and the losses to the dual Athlon MP system under Photoshop and Visual C++ the Kryotech Super G2 ends up being just slightly outperformed by the dual Athlon MP platform.  Obviously this isn’t how you want to look at the performance of the system at all; if you run applications that are extremely MP centric then you’ll probably want to go for the dual Athlon MP system otherwise the Super G2 ends up being very attractive for those applications that don’t always benefit as much from the transition to multiple processors.