Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part I: First Encounter
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 4, 2005 2:44 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
semi-Final Words
The verdict on dual core is far from in, but what we've presented here is a start. We have more coverage coming, including power consumption, overclocking potential and a look at the more economical dual core price points from Intel. We're also hard at work on creating new multitasking benchmarks with the hopes of eventually reaching the holy grail of being able to measure and quantify system response time accurately. To that effect, if you all have any suggestions for usage models that you'd like to see tested or any benchmarking suggestions in general, please let us know.
We're far from being able to make any conclusions about dual core or Intel's Pentium D/Extreme Edition, but there are some things that we can say at this point:
- In general use of the system, the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 felt just as fast as the 3.73GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. In multitasking, there was no substitute for the dual core Pentium Extreme Edition.
- Hyper Threading made a decent impact on our usage, even on the dual core platform. However, the benchmarks show that Hyper Threading on dual core doesn't always result in a performance boost. That being said, we'd still opt for Hyper Threading as it just seems to make things smoother than without on the dual core chip. Although Intel has a desire to separate their Extreme Edition and Pentium D lines, we think that Hyper Threading is the wrong feature to use as a differentiator - all users could benefit from its presence on their dual core platforms.
- Intel's pricing strategy for dual core makes a lot of sense to force market adoption. In the near future, we will be looking at Intel's cheapest dual core offering to see how well it stacks up to AMD's similarly priced single core chips. The only way to make sure that developers crank out multithreaded desktop software is to ensure a large installed user base, and Intel appears to be committed to doing that.
- AMD should get an even larger boost from the move to dual core than Intel has, simply because AMD doesn't presently have the ability to execute more than one thread at a time. Intel's Hyper Threading on their single core chips does improve response time greatly as well as improves multitasking performance. For AMD, the move to dual core will give their users the benefits in response time that their Intel counterparts have enjoyed with Hyper Threading as well as the extra advantage offered by having two identical cores on a chip.
- When it comes to dual core vs. single core with Hyper Threading, there's a huge difference. While both improve system response time, dual core improves it more while also guaranteeing better overall system performance. Hyper Threading lets you multitask, dual core lets you actually get work done while multitasking.
That's all for now - we'll have much more dual core coverage later on this week and the next.
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Da DvD - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
Many of you are making a huge mistake. You are proposing insane multitasking tests to 'bring these processors to their knees'. This is wrong! Since when do we adjust the review to the product?This is similar to only running benchmarks whose working sets fit completely into the 2mb cache of a new cpu. In other words, when you review a product like this, do NOT suddenly change all your variables, keep them as you always had them. Later on, you can adjust variables (tests), and draw your conclusions accordingly.
Also, I hope people understand that when Anand would have run these test on a dual Xeon 3.2 system, the results would have been virtually the same. You ALREADY KNOW dual cpu systems can be twice as fast as single cpu systems in certain tests, and show no improvement at all in others.
I really appreciate the article in general, but it would have been SO much better when the PICTURE would have been complete. For this, a dual Opteron system and a dual Xeon system should have been included, AND the tests should have a reflected typical user workloads. If for some reason all cpu's would have been dualcore already, -I- still wouldn't be importing PST files while running my games. Again, when reviewing something, it's wrong to adapt the workload to the product. This is why some people now question your integrety, Anand, because quickly reading through the article DOES give the impression Dual-Core is THE thing, while there's so much it is not!
And yes, i do realize you don't have dual Opteron/Xeon rigs at hand, but still, you choose to present this incomplete picture. It was a choice, but not necessarily the correct one ;-)
Regards,
DvD
Zebo - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
Anand for game marks I like to see a dvdshrink deep analysis/encode, with grabit downloading 8 threads with plenty more cued, some seti at home, then run farcry and report FPS.:DThat will bring these single procesors to thier knees obviously but I want to see if DC is really worth it since that's the type of choices I'm forced to choose between.
tjahns - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
As I am not a regular reader nor familiar with the benchmarks used in this article, I am rather disappointed that the scales on the graphs in this article do not indicate what is being measured nor whether "higher is better" or "lower is better".Calin - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
What would be better in games (I think), especially in first person shooter games, would be to compare the lowest frames per second, and not the highest or the averaged frame rate. And I think this would represent an tremendous advantage for multiprocessors/multicoreCalin - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
"Nice article, as always. I wonder how memory bandwidth increases/decreases will effect the performance of the already bandwidth hungry intel processors."The Intel processors are no longer bandwidth hungry, as the move to the 1066FSB showed. However, throw a second processor into the mix, and things might change
Calin - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
The Register has a small review on it, and compare it against a dual Xeon righttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/05/review_int...
Icehawk - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
Great article - loved the multitasking benchmarks.Here's what I have running all the time:
WinAmp 5
Outlook 2003
Firefox 1.02
ICQQ2003Pro
Norton A/V2005
drivers for audio & video :)
How is my performance affected by multiple Word, Excel, Pshop CS windows? Can I game with them open or do I still need to shut everything down like on my current system? Could I encode a DVD and play a game? Play a DVD off one drive and encode off another?
As mentioned some of what I want to know is can I do things that currently require me to really run two boxes? I recently moved Azareus (torrent client) and all of my DVD encoding & burning to a second rig.
Macro2 - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
No games tested at all? Since when does this happen? Intel doesn't want dual core to look bad so Anandtech doesn't bench ANY games at all.Come on guys, judging by the article below on the Inquirer I'm not the only one who is suspicious.
http://theinquirer.net/?article=22332
Same ole' same ole'
snorre - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
Why did you exclude dual CPU (Opteron/Xeon) systems from your comparisons?I recommend that you guys at Anandtech read this:
http://theinquirer.net/?article=22332
Well said! ;-)
Bathrone - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
What about the new extreme edition and I think WinXP only supports a maximum of two cpus? Im not keen to goto 2003 Server. What are Microsoft going to do - patch XP to support 4 cpus?