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
Gaming Multitasking Scenario 1: Heavy Downloading
In the first article, we ran under the assumption that gamers wanted to have as little running in the background while playing a game. While that ended up being true for a lot of folks, we also received quite a bit of feedback asking for some pretty intense multitasking tests while gaming. The requests were far more intense than even the most strenuous setup that we came up with, but because of the demand for such benchmarks, we spent some time putting a few together. Note that this is by no means supposed to be an exhaustive comparison of all gaming scenarios. We are working on creating more and we apologize if your desired scenario didn't make it into this review, but keep sending in suggestions on how you play and we'll do our best to model some benchmarks after how you use your computer.
The first test basically performs all of the tasks from our first Multitasking Scenario, with the exception of DVD Shrink. We have Firefox loaded, but with all 12 tabs from the third test, iTunes is running and playing a playlist, and Newsleecher is downloading headers. We kept Newsleecher in this test simply because it's the best way for us to be able to have a fairly CPU/disk intensive downloading task running in the background while still maintaining some semblance of repeatability. So, replace Newsleecher with BitTorrent or any other resource-consuming downloading that you may be doing and you're good to go.
Of course, Norton AntiVirus 2004 and Microsoft's AntiSpyware Beta were also running in the background.
First, we ran our Doom 3 benchmark:
The tables have now been turned. While the Athlon 64 held a 30% lead with no multitasking, it's now outpaced by both Intel processors, with the Pentium D holding a 25% performance advantage.
It's no surprise that having two cores yield less of a performance impact to having more applications run in the background.
Doom 3 was actually quite playable on both machines; although, loading the game and the levels took a lot longer on the A64, and there's a lot of stuttering during the actual game.
The Pentium 4 platform was quite a bit better, but there is a definite reduction in performance. Obviously, the Pentium D did the best out of the group, but you still notice the performance drop.
Next, we ran the Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory benchmark:
Once again, the Pentium D is ahead of the Athlon 64, but the improvement in minimum frame rates is particularly impressive. The Pentium D offers twice the minimum frame rate of the Athlon 64 in this scenario.
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Umbra55 - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
Why do you still use the nForce 4 reference board for AMD tests? The real nForce 4 boards exist since over a quarter now and perform 10% better than the reference board. You also pretend to compare CPUs with similar price. Wouldn't it make more sense to compare combinations of mobo/CPU/memory of similar price?This is not a fair comparison (Or is it the intention?)
Umbra55 - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
yde - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
In this atricle, I was unable to find cache information about the AMD chip (usually equipped with a 512 KB L2 cache).To my point of view, in multiple threads scenario, the cache size may have dramatic influence and may explain several handicaps in the benchmarks. It would be nice to know what happens with a 1MB L2 cache Athlon 64 to keep things equal.
AMD chip has shorter branch prediction lines and seem quite well equipped for multitasking in theory, so why is it appearing so weak?
snorre - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
We're still waiting for proper benchmarks comparing dual core Smithfield with dual Opteron/Xeon. When will we see this?Comparing dual core CPUs with single core CPUs is like comparing apples and oranges, totally meaningless.
Calin - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
Thanks for the minimum frame rate comparison! And maybe you should not use so many flash-heavy pages, especially considering that you already told us that Athlon64 is much slower in Flash than Pentium4...Looks like Pentium D is a better choice in more ways than the Prescott is
xsilver - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
The multitasking gaming analysis combined with HT and NCQ was very insightful, almost pioneering...and with dual core AMD's people have to remember that the whole architecture is designed differently, and hence the possible suprises in tasks that the pentium D may not perform well on
but the power consumption advantage on amd is mighty tempting as amd will be the cpu that just keeps on saving -- with power bills that is
Azsen - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
Hi Anand,I was thinking, seeing most games are single-threaded you might like to try and benchmark this scenario on the dual core machine:
Set all the processes including operating system processes and other background processes to run on CPU 0 (first core). Then set the particular game to run on CPU 1 (second core). Have nothing else but the game running on CPU 1. This should dedicate a whole CPU core to the game for maximum performance in theory. I believe you can set the affinity in the task manager or use a batch file to do it.
Then run a Doom3 benchmark or HL2 benchmarks to see if the gaming performance is increased by letting the single-threaded game have a whole CPU core with no interuptions.
Would this be feasible to test?
Cheers. :)
AnnoyedGrunt - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
The AMD not competing with the PD 2.8 will be due to price.Remember that AMD will need to sell a 2 core 2.2 GHz processor for about double the price of the single core version (maybe even more if yields are a problem). Therefore, you should expect a dual core 2.2 proc to be closer to $500-600 instead of the ~$300 processors tested here.
This also explains why AMD is focusing on the workstation market first. It's an area where price is typically not as much a factor, and where they are competing with Xeon prices, so it will be much easier for them to sell procs @ the higher prices.
I'm guessing that AMD's desktop dual core procs will start @ 1.6 or 1.8 GHz, and be priced on par with the Intel offerings. I think the overall performance will be similar to the current single core behavior, but now you can have more stuff running.
I currently have an AMD 939 3200+, so I am looking forward to their dual core offerings in a couple years, and hoping my mobo will be compatible. That would be very cool.
Also, I would like to add vote for a WoW test with Teamspeak running in the background as well as an istance if IE or Firefox with tthotbot.
Thanks,
D'oh!
SLIM - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
Hi Anand,Any chance you could give us a little peak at what dual opterons on the nforce pro chipset can do in the same benches that you did in this article.
A configuration something like this:
Opteron 252s clocked at 1.8GHz, 2.2GHz, 2.6GHz
1 GB ECC DDR400
NVIDIA nForce pro motherboard
ATI Radeon X850 XT PCI Express
NCQ enabled HDD (maxline III, 7200.8, etc)
I looked through all the old articles I could find, but most seemed to contain only server oriented benches. I think that kind of article would be very enlightening as to the future performance of dual core athlons (probably within a couple percent)... maybe help put to rest some of the questions a lot of us have about waiting for amd dualcore, intel dualcore or just overclocking the heck out of a venice a64.
SLIM
Jep4444 - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
SSE3 does almost nothing for the Venice which is barely faster than the Winchester(Xbit Labs benchmarked it already)While Anandtech said the dual cored A64s wouldn't compete with the Pentium D in encoding, unless they actually have dual cored A64s which they can't show us, i'd be willing to argue with that. Encoding is one of those things thats largely affected by Hyper-Threading and the Pentium D loses hyper threading. When the A64 goes dual, its performance increase will be larger than Intels.