Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part I: First Encounter
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 4, 2005 2:44 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Characterizing Dual Core Performance
There are three areas to look at when measuring the performance of a dual core processor:
- Single-threaded application performance
- Multi-threaded Application Performance
- Multitasking Application Performance
For the first category, plain-jane single threaded application performance, the Pentium Extreme Edition or the Pentium D will simply perform identically to the equivalently clocked Pentium 5xx series CPU. The second core will go unused and the performance of the first core is nothing new. Given the short lead time on hardware for this review, we left out all of our single threaded benchmarks given that we can already tell you what performance is like under those tests - so if you're looking for performance under PC WorldBench or any of our Game tests, take a look at our older reviews and look at the performance of the Pentium 4 530 to get an idea of where these dual core CPUs will perform in single threaded apps. There are no surprises here; you could have a 128 core CPU and it would still perform the same in a single threaded application. Closer to its launch, we will have a full review including all of our single and multithreaded benchmarks so that you may have all of the information that will help determine your buying decision in one place.
The next category is pretty easy to benchmark as well. Things like 3ds max, iTunes, and Windows Media Encoder, are all examples of multi-threaded applications that are used rather frequently. We've included a few of these benchmarks as well in this article.
The final category is by far the most interesting as well as the most difficult to truly get a hold on - multitasking performance. The easiest way to measure multitasking performance is to have a number of applications loaded with one or more actively crunching away, and measure the performance of one or more of them. However, an arguably more useful way of looking at multitasking performance is to look at the response time of the system while multitasking. Unfortunately, no real benchmarks exist to measure response time of a system accurately while under a multitasking load, so we're left to do our best to try to develop those benchmarks to help answer the dual vs. single core purchasing debate. We are still working on developing those benchmarks and unfortunately, they didn't make it into this article, but we will keep cranking away and hopefully be able to debut them in one of the upcoming successors to this piece.
We did, however, string together a few benchmarks that don't explicitly measure response time, but do offer a good look at multitasking performance. Despite the fact that Intel has these types of benchmarks on their own, we went out and built benchmarks ourselves that was based on the feedback that we received from you all - the AnandTech readers.
We will describe these benchmarks later on in this piece, but first, let's take a look at two largely single threaded benchmark suites with a touch of multitasking: Winstone and SYSMark.
The Test
Our hardware configurations are similar to what we've used in previous comparisons.
AMD Athlon 64 Configuration
Socket-939 Athlon 64 CPUs
2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel DIMMs 2-2-2-10
NVIDIA nForce4 Reference Motherboard
ATI Radeon X850 XT PCI Express
Intel Pentium 4 Configuration
LGA-775 Intel Pentium 4 and Extreme Edition CPUs
2 x 512MB Crucial DDR-II 533 Dual Channel DIMMs 3-2-2-12
Intel 955X Motherboard
ATI Radeon X850 XT PCI Express
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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??