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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segagenesis - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
Since I mostly play games ill stick to buying the AMD64 3500+. Thanks. My definition of multi-tasking is using a whole other computer ;)The Pentium D seems pretty decent at multitasking as you would define running two things at once but I rarely do that sort of thing since its kind of dumb to encode a DVD in the background while playing a game. Or does encoding a DVD really interfere with browsing the web? I dont know... that and the heat factory output as if it was bad enough is now worse.
Woodchuck2000 - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
#23 - I'm assuming that a dual core A64 at 2.2GHz will blow a Pentium D out of the water at any of the launch frequencies! The Prescott core isn't really designed for multi-core operation, and needs some kind of arbitration logic and some funky-memory-controlling-thingy to work. As a result, the performance improvements in multi-threaded applications aren't anything like the theoretical extra 100% another core could bring. With A64 being designed for multi-core operation I'd expect the increase in performance to be nearer 85%.As regards the performance gap between the P4 630 and A64 3500+, the majority of the benchmarks shown here are designed specifically to show performance improvements in multi-core processors. The 630 is hyper-threaded and therefore logically multi-cored, if not physically so. As such the 630 will have artificially high performance compared with the 3500+ - in most single-application benchmarks, the AMD chip would thrash both Intel chips.
Is there any chance of adding benches for the 630 with HT disabled (or at least giving us an idea of performance.)? We've got a vanilla A64 versus a HT 630 and Dual-core system. It'd be good to see how a single core performs for reference.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
Jeff7181I really can't say more, but you are barking up the wrong tree with those assumptions :)
AMD's dual core will be quite impressive, even more so than Intel's. Don't look at performance as the only vector to measure though...
marcusgarcia
We did look at HT performance when it came out, but the problem is that HT doesn't improve performance in all cases. Look at the Gaming Multitasking Scenario 2 tests, HT reduced performance significantly - most likely because DVD Shrink and Doom 3/Splinter Cell were both contending for floating point resources that were in use. Dual core solves this problem by having two complete sets of execution units, so there's no worry about contention between threads for shared resources.
As far as Half Life 2 goes, it is still single threaded so its performance characteristics would be no different than what you see here.
mlittl3
I've been looking into running VoIP or some sort of voice chat program in the background, the problem surfaces in trying to put together a reliable, repeatable workload. Dual core will most definitely help there, but how much - I do not know.
I haven't given up yet :)
BruceDickenson
Glad to have you on-board and thanks for the kind words :)
Woodchuck2000
The new dual core chips are still LGA-775, but they do require a new motherboard (unlike AMD's solution which just requires a new BIOS). Currently Intel's 945 and 955 chipsets will support dual core, and tomorrow I should have a nForce4 SLI Intel Edition board that will support dual core as well. The new NVIDIA chipset does support dual core, but it's up to motherboard makers to implement support for it in their designs.
Check with the motherboard maker to make sure that dual core is explicitly supported by the board, it should say so somewhere in the manual or on the box.
Take care,
Anand
Jeff7181 - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
#22... Anand said a 2.2 GHz Athlon 64 won't compete with the 2.8 GHz Pentium D. That either means a 2.2 GHz dual core Athlon 64 will have lackluster performance, or it will be AMD's new enthusiast line like the FX is right now, which means it would be competing with the Extreme Edition chips, not the regular line.I guess there's a 3rd possibility. He was referring to dual core Opterons which obviously won't compete with the Pentium D any more than the Opteron competes with the Pentium 4 right now.
Woodchuck2000 - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
Just out of interest, does anyone know what socket do the new cores use? Will the new nVidia chipset support the new cores (it was hinted at briefly, but not stated explicitly...)?#19 - What's your source for those assertions? I've heard reports that AMD have got samples running at well over 2GHz and since the K8 architecture is natrually better suited to multiple cores I'd have expected blistering performance. BTW, does anyone know if the AMD cores will be based on the new Venice rev? Is SSE3 a given?
BruceDickenson - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
Hey all, long time reader, this is my first "post"/comment...Just had to say this is one of the most interesting articles I've read in a long time. I loved the NCQ tangent, it almost felt like you were part of a conversation when you read how Lal Shimpi analyzed the anomaly in his testing.
Loved it! Thanks AT!
marcusgarcia - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
14# again.Forgot to say in the last post, my rant is about HT, not dual cores.
I know 2-cores won't make THAT difference on these trivial things (who needs another 2.8ghz for simple stuff?)...but..HT is benefiting GREATLY from it, yet noone mentioned it and didn't even try this sort of test when HT was launched.
When you see the 3.0 HT doing better than a AMD 3500+ (supposedly 500 points faster), you gotta ask how badly would it beat the AMD 64 3000+, which happens to cost almost the same than the P4 3.0 ghz...which happened to destroy the much faster AMD on the test.
That pretty much sucks and leave us with the impression that people either:
a - wanted to benefit AMD
or
b - were too ingenuous to think on these tests when doing HT tests (which can't be true because i always wanted them)
Jeff7181 - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
Errr... correction...1.) The dual core 2.2 GHz Athlon-64's will be less than impressive and won't even perform in the same class as a Pentium D @ 2.8 GHz.
2.) The mainstream Athlon-64 dual core chips will be running at much less than 2.2 GHz, and the 2.2 GHz dual cores will be the FX line, which compete with the Extreme Edition Pentiums.
marcusgarcia - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
14#Completely wrong.
1º: Outlook checks 8 pop accounts for mail and apply it's rules to it every minute or so.
2º: MSN with webcam can eat quite some CPU, specially because i play on the dark with the "low light filter" turned on, which happens to eat quite some CPU.
3º: For every file opened/closed both the AVG and the MS anti-spyware are going to have a check if that's malicious and if the action is allowed.
When i close everything and run 3dmark01 i get around 300 - 600 more points out of it from my 12200 points score.
PS: don't forget IE, which is usually opened here or on tom's hardware (or both and some more), which happen to have a lot of those huge flash banners.
I think that DOES make *a lot* of difference.
Add to that the fact of many people using skype while gaming, mainly on FPS and RTS, which can make all the difference.
Jeff7181 - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
"Let's just say that the dual core Athlon 64 running at 2.2GHz won't be compared to a dual core Pentium D running at 2.8GHz."So you leave two possibilities.
1.) The dual core 2.2 GHz Athlon-64's will be less than impressive and won't even perform in the same class as a Pentium D @ 2.8 GHz, but rather dual core Extreme Edition chips.
2.) The desktop dual core Athlon-64's will be running at much less than 2.2 GHz.