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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
141 Comments
View All Comments
sharikou - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
granted, this annand review was only part one, but hexus.net had done it much better in just one set of benches. From reading hexus.net's review, one can clearly see the advantages and limitations of INTEL's two-cpu-in-one-package device, basically, the intel chip are two cpus, so it can do two heavy duty things at the same time, but if you try to do 1 thing at a time, the new chip is slower, or if you do 3 things at the same time, the same slowness will occur.So your benchmarks are just designed to fit the new INTEL dual-CPU, doing two things, instead of one or three at the same time.
One suggestion I have is to do some comparison with a 2P Opteron workstation, we know AMD will release dual core Opterons soon, and using a SUN or BOXX opteron workstation, you can have 4 cores, it will be interesting to see how these 4 cores will perform.
We know INTEL won't be able to release 2P dual-chips until 2006. AMD forced INTEL to rush to dual chip.
Hans Maulwurf - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
Well, I think I have to open my mind for dual core.But maybe you understand my fears about multitasking benchmarks. One could make many different benchmarks performing different on different platforms and chose one to put in his review. This looks a bit arbitrarily.
If someone benches games, for example, everybody will be curious if there is no Q3, D3 or UT. So the reader knows if a common(realistic) scenario is choosen for benching. Thsi is almost impossible for multitasking, I think.
I´m really interested in power consumption. Hexus writes there is only a slight increase in TDP, and no voltage drop. It will be interisting to see how this is possible as most parts of the CPU are doubled and I´ve not heard anything about different manufacturing techniques used for DC.
sharikou - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
This is one of the worst reviews, worse than Toms' and worse than the AnndTech Athlon64 3500 vs Xeon 3.6GHZ review.1) What's the hardware setup?
2) why weren't there any game reviews if you are using $600 video cards?
3) why isn't there any power consumption figures?
INTEL's dual core isn't really dual-core, it's just two CPUs stick together, the two cpus share the same bus, without any logic in between. performance-wise, it should be the same as two xeon 3.2GHZ, and we know from Toms benchmark, a single Opteron 244 beats 2P xeon 3.2 in real applications.
lopri - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
This is an impressive piece of work. No wonder AT is #1! Refreshingly different but more real-world-like benchmark.SignalPST - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
Question:If you were to force a game to run using the second core, and only that game on the second core, and leaving the rest of the system overhead to the first core, wouldn't that provide a smoother and faster performance compared with the identical clocked single-core CPU?
JustAnAverageGuy - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
Page 12."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."
Shouldn't that be 4.7GB?
Distributed Computing programs would be a good idea!
michael2k - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
#51: Well, for people who would/SHOULD buy a dual core system, those are realistic scenarios. For those who game, or don't do those tasks, you won't see any performance benefits*#52: They were thinking, "The performance of the dual-core is more or less the same as the equivalent single-core CPU, so let's not be redundant and test dual-core CPUs where single-core CPUs are more cost effective**
*Performance in games will increase when they effectively do two things at once of roughly equal importance. For example:
ChessQuake, where one CPU deals with graphics, physics, sound, and AI, while the other CPU plays a game of chess
DVDooM, where one CPU draws the brightest and darkest blacks anyone has ever seen, while the other CPU is encoding it to DVD for posterity
As long as sound and light reflects geometry, you can't separate sound and rendering from interaction. Dual CPUs would be useful if you have two keyboards, two mice, and two displays for a two player game of DooM3 on a single computer.
**See the single core equivalent reviews. AnandTech as done them.
kmmatney - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
misspell:Will Dual-Core work in Windows 2000? I don't see why not. I'd like to see a comparison between hyper-threading versus dual core in Win2K...I've heard that hyperthreading support is crippled in Win2K, but perhaps dual-core will work normally.
kmmatney - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
Will Dual-Core work in Windows 2000? I don't see why not. I'd like to see a comparison between hyper-threading a dual core in Win2K...I've heard that hyperthreading support is crippled in Win2K, but perhaps dual-core will work normally.Natronomonas - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
With two top-notch gaming CPUs (EE, FX), even if they do say the performance of the dual-core is more or less the same as the equivalent single-core CPU, it is disappointing not to see even a single gaming benchmark.What were they thinking??