Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part I: First Encounter
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 4, 2005 2:44 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Business Application Performance
Business Winstone 2004
Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:- Microsoft Access 2002
- Microsoft Excel 2002
- Microsoft FrontPage 2002
- Microsoft Outlook 2002
- Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
- Microsoft Project 2002
- Microsoft Word 2002
- Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
- WinZip 8.1
There's no surprise here - your best business application performance is going to come from a very fast single core CPU.
Office Productivity SYSMark 2004
SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."
The next test is Document Creation performance:
"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."
The final test in our Office Productivity suite is Data Analysis, which BAPCo describes as:
"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."
The Office Productivity SYSMark 2004 suite shows some benefit to dual core, given that there is quite a bit of multitasking involved in the test suite. Despite the multitasking, the Pentium Extreme Edition running at 3.2GHz isn't able to trounce its single core 3.73GHz relative.
Business Winstone 2004 includes a multitasking test as a part of its suite, which does the following:
"This test uses the same applications as the Business Winstone test, but runs some of them in the background. The test has three segments: in the first, files copy in the background while the script runs Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer in the foreground. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the second segment. In that segment, Excel and Word operations run in the foreground while WinZip archives in the background. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the third segment. In that segment, Norton AntiVirus runs a virus check in the background while Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Access, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft FrontPage, and WinZip operations run in the foreground."
The performance of the dual core Extreme Edition comes within 5% of the 3.73GHz EE, despite the fact that the single core chip has a 16% clock speed advantage, but it is still slower overall.
The second test finally shows something positive for the dual core chip, with a negligable 2% performance lead. This is the perfect example of how multi-core can be a substitute for clock speed when it comes to performance. Note that despite the Pentium Extreme Edition being faster than the 3.73EE, the single core Athlon 64 FX-55 is faster than both.
The third and final test also shows a slight performance advantage for the dual core Extreme Edition, even over the Athlon 64 FX-55.
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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??