AMD's 760MPX Chipset - Multiprocessor for the Masses
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 18, 2001 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
CAD Performance
Over the past year the Athlon has become a hit within the CAD market because of its low price and high performance. To find out exactly why the Athlon has been so successful in that market we turned to AutoCad 2002 in order to measure the influence the CPU had on performance.
AutoCad 2002 isn't the best application to take advantage of multiple processors however. The vast majority of operations and calculations performed in AutoCad aren't multithreaded, meaning that one processor will remain idle while the other one handles the task. Even on a single Athlon MP 1900+ however, these tasks will peg the CPU at 100% utilization meaning that anything else going on in the background will suffer. Some of the 2D operations are multithreaded but overall, AutoCad users won't see an improvement by making the transition to dual CPUs.
Where adding a second CPU will help however is in multitasking. As we just mentioned, most processes in AutoCad will eat up 100% of the CPU time of a single Athlon MP 1900+ meaning that anything from playing an MP3 to working on another project in AutoCad at the same time will result in reduced overall performance. A second CPU would allow you to more effectively multitask or even work on multiple AutoCad projects simultaneously with much greater performance.
In order to measure performance under AutoCad 2002 we used Cadalyst Labs' C2001 benchmark.
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23.74The 3D wireframe portion of the C2001 test is limited by two things - the platform its running on as well as the video card used. Since we stuck with an end-user class GeForce3, the wireframe performance is not as great as a Quadro 2 or higher end 3DLabs graphics card would be; making that a clear limitation. This would explain why there's relatively no difference between the dual Athlon MP 1900+ and the same CPUs just clocked 400MHz lower.
The gap between the dual Xeon platform and the two Athlon MP solutions however indicates that an inherent limitation of the Xeon's 860 chipset or the Xeon's architecture in general is what is holding this CPU back. There are a number of possibilities to explore here, although we don't believe the cause of its performance to be related to bandwidth. It could very well be that an overall cache size advantage gives the Athlon MPs the advantage, but it's clear that the Xeons are not able to perform in the same class as the Athlon MPs in this test.
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The 3D Gouraud shading index is clearly limited by our test bed's GeForce3. The Xeons exert a negligible lead over the Athlon MP 1.2s, and the same is true for the faster Athlon MP 1900+ setup.
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The non-graphic portion of the test includes all I/O operations as well as all calculations that are made before the display of any graphical changes meaning that it's easily the most CPU intensive portion of this benchmark.
With that said, the benchmark results speak volumes about the relative performance of these dual CPU setups. The dual Athlon MP 1.2GHz setup we ran was already 9.7% faster than the dual Xeon 1.7GHz system, and the new dual Athlon MP 1900+ simply extended that lead. Even a pair of 2GHz Xeon processors won't be able to offer similar performance as they would only just begin to outperform the dual Athlon MP 1.2GHz solution.
These results alone are good indication of why the Athlon has caught on so well in this market and why it will continue to do so.
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The 2D graphics index illustrates some of the efficiencies of the various platforms since the 2D tests were the only ones that took advantage of both processors. Here the Xeon is able to outperform the dual Athlon MP 1.2 by an 8% margin and only falls about 5% short of the Athlon MP 1900+. An overclocked dual Xeon 1.9GHz system would even outperform our dual Athlon MP 1900+ test bed in this benchmark.
Explanation for this could be the increased memory bandwidth of the Xeon's dual channel RDRAM memory bus able to feed the processors much better than the Athlon MPs which have to fight for 1/3 less memory bandwidth than the Xeons.
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Totaling up all of those indices we see that the dual Athlon MP 1900+ completed the tests in 5.3 minutes less than the dual Athlon MP 1.2GHz; a decent boost in performance. The difference between the dual Athlon MP 1900+ and the dual Xeon 1.7GHz is much larger at 11 minutes.
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The overall performance index shows the dual Athlon MP 1.2GHz and dual Xeon 1.7GHz platforms performing within 4% of each other, while the dual Athlon MP 1900+ is a good 11% and 15% higher than the two respective platforms.
Since our Xeons were unlocked we could overclock them to 1.9GHz to see if that would reduce the performance gap a bit, however they came in at 44.63 which is almost identical to the performance of the dual Athlon MP 1.2.
If this is an indication of overall performance in AutoCad then it's plain and clear why the Athlon and Athlon MP platforms have become such favorites in the CAD community.
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