Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part I: First Encounter
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 4, 2005 2:44 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Dual Core System Impressions
Despite our best efforts, some of the best characterization of the impact of dual core is done with words. The best way to put it is like this: if an application is eating up all of your CPU time, with dual core, you still have one core left to make the rest of your system just as responsive as before. But if you want a more detailed account of such a scenario, take a look at some of our lab notes:
CPU: Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz, Hyper Threading Disabled
So, I was playing around with Outlook, copying a bunch of emails, basically the equivalent of copying a 280MB PST file, which isn't huge by any means. In copying the emails, the CPU utilization skyrocketed to 100% and I was off trying to browse the web to see how responsive that was.
On this HT disabled P4 3.73EE, I could browse the web just fine. I had Firefox open and around 10 tabs and all was fine. I went to minimize Firefox and the animation was very choppy, but it still minimized/restored just fine. I had Photoshop CS running in the background - I tried to switch to it, but all I got was the outline of Photoshop. I couldn't see or interact with the app at all. I switched back to my other apps, Newsleecher, Firefox, iTunes, and they all worked fine, but Photoshop and Outlook were not responding.
I tried to take a screenshot of what was going on, but print screen wouldn't work. I could launch Paint, but I couldn't paste anything into it. So, I went to go get my digital camera to take a picture of it, but my CF card was full. I went and found my CF card adapter, plugged it into my personal machine, copied all of my pictures back to my computer (128MB card), wrote this text and then put the CF card back in my camera and took a picture of what was going on. At least 10 minutes had to have elapsed and Photoshop was still not responding.
The only solution? Kill both Photoshop and Outlook using task manager - at least I had access to task manager.
I wanted to see if it was a fluke, so I tried it again. This time, Photoshop was fine, but Outlook still hung. I closed and restarted Photoshop and got the following: Photoshop was basically hung and slowly made its way into a loaded state. A bit of a pain, especially when the only solution is to kill Outlook and I still can't get my emails copied over.
CPU: Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz, Hyper Threading Enabled
I repeat the same basic test with HT on; the obvious difference is that the UI is a lot faster. Minimizing/restoring windows is no longer super choppy, and application launches are much quicker. Launching Photoshop didn't yield the same, almost dying; results as before.
To push things even further, I started the DVD Shrink test and although the performance was obviously impacted, the system still remained quite responsive - other than Outlook, which was taking its sweet time.
I could still browse the web just fine, and overall, the rest of the system was pretty impressive despite Outlook being a rogue process.
CPU: Dual Core Pentium D 3.2GHz
Now, time to try it out on the Pentium D 3.2GHz. On this chip, I went through the same setup. The first thing I noticed was that merely clicking on the Inbox in Outlook didn't pause the system for 7 - 10 seconds as it did on the single core platforms. It only took 1 - 2 seconds; it felt much more responsive.
The next thing was that the Outlook window never turned completely blank. I still couldn't play around with the Outlook interface, but the window was always drawn. I'm not sure if this is necessarily a great thing, but it's a noticeable difference. I could still minimize the window, but I just couldn't interact with anything within the window.
Time to stress the system a bit more. I fired up the DVD Shrink benchmark, and started shrinking a DVD while downloading headers from Newsleecher. I then closed Photoshop and tried to restart it...wow, the application opened as quickly as it normally would have - no delays, nothing.
Outlook did eventually start listing itself as "Not Responding", but I still had full interaction with the rest of my system, even though both CPUs were pegged at 100% I'm guessing that because of the nature of the other applications, I could still switch between them, interact with them and launch more apps without any noticeable degradation in performance.
The other major change was that Outlook could now be closed using its own X button, instead of me having to kill it via task manager. Speeding up the Outlook task would require faster single cores (and maybe a faster hard disk), but dealing with its impact on the rest of the system is best handled by multiple cores.
CPU: Dual Core Pentium Extreme Edition 840
The experience here was pretty much the same as the Pentium D, but just with even better performance in the DVD Shrink task (still taking under 14 minutes to deal with the DVD).
The computer was maybe slightly more responsive, but nothing huge. When compared to the non-HT Pentium D. It is clear that HT does help dual core, although not as much as it helps single core P4s.
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mlittl3 - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
#90,Please, oh, please read Anand's blog from now on. He did just as you are suggesting a couple of days ago before the article was posted/written. He asked the readership for multitasking scenarios and he but those in the article.
Read his blogs. They are awesome.
Keep up the good work, Anand and Anandtech staff, and even though you don't have to give into the naysayers about lack of gaming benchmarks, thanks for being understanding and giving the readers what they want.
That is the sign of true journalistic integrity. :)
suryad - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
As always great work Anand, and for all the users griping about the multitasking testing setup, well maybe Anand would be open to a set of multitasking suggestions his readers most regularly do. Maybe we can all offer suggestions and they will be tested for the second look probably sometime in the future on dual cores and hopefully AMD will have their bad boys out off the cage by then.Also benches on Linux would be great...64 bit and 32 bit.
Surya
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
kjohnsonI'll let my actions speak for themselves, I've got gaming in Part II and surprisingly enough, it's no different than what I said in Part I - gaming performance of the dual core Pentium D is identical to a single core Pentium 4 of the same clock speed.
The multitasking tests in Part I were largely determined by responses to a "how do you multitask" question I posted in my blog on Friday. Out of the 65 responses, hardly any mentioned gaming as a multitasking scenario, so given my limited time with the system I decided to focus on what the readers asked for. That's also why I split the article into multiple parts, I knew that more performance testing would be desired but a desire for information would also be there on day one.
Insinuating that Intel somehow strong armed me into excluding certain benchmarks is just ignorant of how things work, at least at AnandTech. It's a great way to get attention but it's way off base. Intel told me when the system was shipping and when the NDA lifted, no more, no less. I spent all weekend putting together benchmarks that I thought the readership would like to see, not simply re-run benchmarks that we already had results of.
I've been doing this for 8 years, and the one thing I've always known is that it doesn't matter who is first to publish an article, but it is the article that does the best job and is the most thorough that matters. Trading integrity for exclusivity never makes sense, thinking it does requires a very short term memory and no sense of how things pan out in the long run. Being that in 3 weeks AnandTech will celebrate its 8th year anniversary, I don't think you can argue that type of thinking is characteristic of myself or anyone at this site.
But I'm not here to try and correct anyone's misconceptions of myself or this site, I'm here to deliver what the readers want and what will help you all make the best, most accurate purchasing decisions. In doing so I've taken every last comment to heart, as I always do, and I'm doing my best to incorporate your requests into Part II...just as I did in Part I.
As I mentioned in my blog, I'm an open book with nothing to hide, if there are questions of integrity or ethics fire away and I'll be more than happy to answer them.
Take care,
Anand
Amagus - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
Wow that Inquirer article basically insinuates that Anand (it's obvious who he's referring to) was bought out because part I of a preview (!!) didn't contain any gaming benchmarks. I wouldn't stand for that.blwest - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
Nice article, as always. I wonder how memory bandwidth increases/decreases will effect the performance of the already bandwidth hungry intel processors.michael2k - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
#83, #85Gaming wasn't addressed because gaming, by itself, won't see huge improvements with dual core*
If you run IRC, AIM, FireFox, and BitTorrent while you game, then yes, you will see a performance increase, but not over a single core CPU running only the game by itself. A fast single core CPU will be much, much, better for a game. Or if you run WoW and EQ on two monitors, you will see a benefit.
*Drastic rewrites of OpenGL and DirectX will see benefits with dual core. For example, if front and back buffers were handled by different CPUs, or if you can split the screen into to sections and have one half processed by one CPU and the other half by another. Another performance technique might be to let one CPU deal with vertex culling, occlusion, and decomposition, while the other CPU deals with shadow calculations, or something suitably complex. But that requires the game to be written for dual core, and won't appear on games already on the market.
kjohnson - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
Here's why this article does not mention any gaming benchmarks:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22332.bdchambers79 - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
I just thought I'd say, I often run the Persistance of Vision Raytracer (www.povray.org) in the background on my computer for several hours (or days... hehe) at a time. While it's running, I am able to do little more than edit text. However, I also like to code and play games.So, what I would like to see would be POV-Ray running in the background, with MS Dev Studio or GCC running multiple times in the foreground; or, POV-Ray in the background with a game (NOT necessarily Doom3, guys, though it would be a good benchmark) in the foreground (perhaps in a window, so you can see POV's results). Or, for those truly masochistic souls, POV, DevStudio and Doom3 all running at the same time (though that's less likely to occur in RL) :)
BLHealthy4life - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
I didn't read every single post here, but i do hope that it's ben mentioned that there were wasn't one single game run on this system. Surely this will be done in part two??fitten - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
#80, that kind of change won't happen withough redigning the memory interface (of either) which would mean that current motherboards wouldn't be able to use the parts (which at least AMD is claiming will be possible).