Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part I: First Encounter
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 4, 2005 2:44 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Multitasking Scenario 1: DVD Shrink
If you've ever tried to backup a DVD, you know that the process can take a long time. Just ripping the disc to your hard drive will eat up a good 20 minutes, and then there's the encoding. The encoding can easily take between 20 - 45 minutes depending on the speed of your CPU, and once you start doing other tasks in the background, you can expect those times to grow even longer.
For this test, we used DVD Shrink, one of the simplest applications available to compress and re-encode a DVD to fit on a single 4.5GB disc. We ran DVD Decrypt on the Star Wars Episode VI DVD so that we had a local copy of the DVD on our test bed hard drive (in a future version of the test, we may try to include DVD Decrypt performance in our benchmark as well). All of the DVD Shrink settings were left at default, including telling the program to assume a low priority, a setting many users check in order to be able to do other things while DVD Shrink is working.
As a single application with no multitasking involved, here's how DVD Shrink performs:
As you can see, the new dual core chips can shrink a DVD in about 70% of the time of the 3.73EE. But what happens to performance when you start doing other things in the background?
In order to find out, we did the following:
1) Open Firefox and load the following web pages in tabs (we used local copies of all of the web pages):
We kept the browser on the AT front page.
2) Open iTunes and start playing the latest album of avid AnandTech reader 50 Cent on repeat all.
3) Open Newsleecher.
4) Open DVD Shrink.
5) Login to our news server and start downloading headers for our subscribed news groups.
6) Start backup of Star Wars Episode VI - Return of the Jedi. All default settings, including low priority.
DVD Shrink was the application in focus; this matters because by default, Windows gives special scheduling priority to the application currently in the foreground (we will test what happens when it's not in the foreground later in this article). We waited until the DVD Shrink operation was complete and recorded its completion time. Below are the results:
Now, we start to see where dual core helps. In this relatively simple multitasking scenario, the DVD shrink task took more than twice as long on single core CPUs than it did on dual core chips. The Pentium 4 without Hyper Threading took a full 35 minutes to complete the task, compared to the 9.3 minutes of the dual core Pentium Extreme Edition. Even the fastest from AMD couldn't hold a candle to the dual core offerings.
And this was only with a minimal amount of multitasking. Had more applications been running or had actual user interaction taken place during the test, the dual vs. single core gap would've grown even more.
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michaelpatrick33 - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link
AMD's dualcore will use less power and produce less heat apparently and last I checked an FX-51 (2200) out performs the Intel 3200 in a single core configuration so it will be interesting what a dualcore AMD at 2200 or 2400 will do compared to the Pentium 4 3200 dualcore. AMD is going after the busines market where the money and the desire for dual core will be greatest. Why isn't Intel going for that market? Interesting question.CrazyCurl - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link
good review! cant wait to see more info. I am particularly interested in heat dissapation as well and would be nice to see the new unreal engine that supports multithreading benchmarks but that would be be a ways off id assume.Is the 955X gonna support pressler? is that why it has 1066 fsb and ddr-667?
dragonflycms - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link
How about a web developer test I constantly run these programsDragonflycms 9.1.2
Apache 1.3.9
MySql 4.1
PHP 4.0
Photoshop 7.0
Flash MX 2004
Fireworks MX 2004
Dreamweaver MX 2004
Firefox
Hydra IRC
Messenger
Yahoo Messenger
The web server and mysql drastically effect the runing of the multimedia applications. This would be a great multitask test.
cHodAXUK - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link
#34 You are absolutly right there Anand, to this day I have still not had a single CPU system as responsive as my old dual O/C Celeron 550 machine. I ran it along side a P3/800 for a long time and always much prefered the Celeron box for general day to day tasks, hell my AMD 3500 feels damn fast most of the time but when I try multitask a bit too much it just takes forever to even get menus to pop down. Dual core is definately the way to go for the future, when the apps/games start to catch up with the technology everyone will wonder how they ever did without a multi core/cpu system.stephenbrooks - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link
If it's any help to y'all asking about thermals, [H]ard|OCP says:"Our Intel 840 will have an operating voltage between 1.2V and 1.4V and have a Thermal Power Design of 130W"
knitecrow - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link
thanks Anand... it is the power consumption and power dissipation profiles that I really want to see.Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link
oh and power consumption is coming... :)Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link
Hans MaulwurfThese usage scenarios were described by AnandTech readers in my recent request for benchmarks, they weren't anything prescribed by any hardware manufacturers.
Ask anyone who has used a dual processor system, things are just smoother. The reason we've never recommended dual processors systems in the past is mostly because of price. In less than 3 months you should be able to, in theory, purchase a dual core processor for as little as $240. Not since the days of the dual Celeron 300A systems has dual processing been that affordable.
Take care,
Anand
Slaimus - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link
The best thing about dual core is that you do not need HT aware OS's anymore. It sucks when you want to run Win2000 with HT and getting slower speeds.Shlong - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link
Instead of trying to take screenshots, maybe you could've used one of those desktop video capture programs to try to get a better visual representation of what you were trying to explain.