Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part II: A Deeper Look
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 6, 2005 12:23 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
The Pentium 4 and Pentium D perform quite similarly here, but the Athlon 64 3500+ is obviously the strongest performer out of the three when it comes to single threaded business applications.
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."
SYSMark paints a much more evenly matched picture between AMD and Intel in the Office Productivity suite. What's interesting is that even AMD recommends SYSMark 2004 as the best overall system performance test for multi-core desktop CPUs.
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 multitasking tests show the Pentium D 2.8GHz and the Athlon 64 3500+ as equal competitors, with AMD winning the first two tests and Intel winning the last. This just goes to show you that not all multitasking will be immediately faster on a dual core chip.
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segagenesis - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
#30 - Excuse me for trying to save money also. Last I checked Intel was still more expensive. Not to mention Extremely Expensive edition.rqle - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
All i know is that i alt-tab / alt-enter to the desktop running general apps all the time while gaming. I bought two system so i can download while gaming on the other system for this very reason. To do both at the same time would cause the ftp software to go into idle state with the fastest download speed at only 8-10kb/s. I can set the ftp software at a higher priority but then it would just cripple my gaming. These dual core look very promising, but ill hold out for amd dual core.GentleStream - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
I'm interested in benchmarks that would be relevant to scientific computing and software development.How about benchmarking a parallel compile of some non-trivial software package such as building the
gcc compiler. That takes quite a long time on my 4 year old laptop.
danidentity - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
So when are the Pentium D and the new chipsets being released?Spill it Anand. ;)
Turnip - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
#23What about the fourth option? That by the time AMD's desktop dual core processor is available, Intel will have a new dual core processor available. Now, whether we're talking more than "two cores bunged on a chip", or whether we're simply talking a jacked up FSB (which has, remember, always given Intel a hefty jump in the encoding arena), I don't know. But I do know one thing...
Intel is a very big company and Intel has very big sleeves. ;)
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
SpearhawkGood catch, the graphing engine didn't regenerate those graphs properly. Fixed now.
Take care,
Anand
Questar - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
I love this, all the AMD fanboys having seizures over that fact that an Intel CPU can actually have some benefits.It's been a blast reading all these posts the last two days.
Spearhawk - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
He said that a 2.2 GHz dualcore Athlon 64 wouldn't compete with the 2.8 GHz Pentium D at encoding. Notice the encoding part, he said nothing about other stuff.I'm guessing one can know that by looking at dual CPU Opteron systems, the dualcore A64 won't beat them, and if they can't beat a 2.8 Pentium D then the dualcore A64 won't be able to either.
Is there something wrong with the graphs in the DVD Shrink/Game test? The comments doesn't seem to match them (especialy the part about the minimum frame rate being equal)
PorBleemo - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
How do you calculate the system wattages like that? I have been attempting to find detailed information on how to do this but have turned up nothing yet.Thanks!
Illissius - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
#10 - you are quite correct. anyone who games with a processor-intensive background task running at the same time _on a single core processor_ is insane. the reason I wanted to see benchmarks is to see whether dual core changes that.theoretically, I don't see why it wouldn't work:
- you only have one GPU, and only the game is using it
- you have two processor intensive tasks - the game and the background task, and two cores, one for each
hence, no conflict. whether that actually holds up in the real world is/was the question (if the background task is multithreaded, or heavily uses reasources other than just the processor, then naturally the above doesn't hold true).