Overall System Performance using WorldBench 5

Our final set of overall system performance tests come from WorldBench 5, which is a pretty good tool for looking at older application performance as well as single-threaded performance. 

WorldBench 5

Overall, the Core Duo does extremely well here despite its higher latency cache, offering performance equal to that of the Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and 5% greater than the Pentium M 760. 

The breakdown of the WorldBench 5 score is reported below. Note that the values below are task completion times in seconds with lower numbers translating into better performance.

  AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+  AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+  AMD Athlon 64 X2 2.0GHz/1MB  Intel Core Duo T2500  Intel Pentium M 760
ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0 537 574 572 544 545
Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1 339 364 362 319 325
Adobe Premiere 6.5 388 402 400 405 404
Ahead Software Nero Express 6.0.0.3 507 509 506 512 510
Discreet 3ds max 5.1 (DirectX) 254 268 266 256 256
Discreet 3ds max 5.1 (OpenGL) 317 337 333 320 322
Microsoft Office XP with SP-2 524 531 536 531 505
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0 283 304 301 295 415
Mozilla 1.4 360 440 411 338 310
Multitasking: Mozilla and Windows Media Encoder 445 484 445 439 634
MusicMatch Jukebox 7.10 483 527 531 511 529
Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator 1.5 262 278 277 267 400
WinZip Computing WinZip 8.1 401 420 419 396 399

Overall System Performance using SYSMark 2004 Professional Application Performance with 3dsmax, Adobe Premier and Photoshop
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  • Furen - Monday, December 19, 2005 - link

    The P6 has two FP units: An FADD unit and an FMUL unit. One of the big weaknesses of the P6 is the fact that the FMUL unit is not fully-pipelined but instead uses part of the FADD unit for FMUL operations. The K7, on the other hand, has three fully-pipelined units, an FADD, an FMUL and an FSTORE.
  • tayhimself - Monday, December 19, 2005 - link

    No he's not. AT's hardware reviewers are nublets. One thing to note though, Dothan FPU is better than the P4's hence its gaming performance advantage over the P4 in the old tests that everyone saw. It's likely that Yonah FPU is still the same as Dothan (similar to P3) and inferior to AMD's.
  • saratoga - Monday, December 19, 2005 - link

    Actually the FPU on the P4 was tremendously more powerful then Dothan or Yonah. While games do use the FPU, they're not that bottlenecked by it on modern systems. The reason Dothan did so well was because of its large, very low latency L2 cache. This is roughly equivilent to the primary advantage of the K8, a very low latency memory controller.
  • tayhimself - Monday, December 19, 2005 - link

    Youre right about the low latency L1/L2 caches on the Dothan, but the P4 (Williamette/Northwood) has those as well. But the P4 FPU is only powerful in SSE2 mode where it can load store larger chunks of data. Not all games use that unfortunately.
  • saratoga - Monday, December 19, 2005 - link

    You're wrong on several points.

    First:
    Dothan L2 latency (clks): 10 clks
    Northwood L2 latency (clks): 18 clks (approximately)

    So Dothan's L2 cache is roughly 2x as fast and 4x as large. If you compare prescott with its amazingly slow L2, the situation is even more biased towards Dothan. Clearly, in terms of cache performance Dothan has a massive advantage, at least once you're out of the L1.

    Second, you're confusing SSE2 and vector processing. While SSE2 can perform vector ops, it also handles plan scaler as well. In x86-64 SSE actually replaces the traditional x87 unit. The relative performance of the two is irrelevent however, the P4 was faster in both.
  • coldpower27 - Monday, December 19, 2005 - link


    Dothan I agree with as having 10 Cycle Cache.
    Northwood has 16 Cycle Cache.

    Well you also got to keep in mind northwoods clock frequency plays a role in speeding up the cache, accces latencies for Dothan @ 2.0GHZ vs Northwood @ 3.2GHZ are basically equivalent. Though the 2.26GHZ Dothan has the fastest cache of all.
  • AlexWade - Monday, December 19, 2005 - link

    Although, "Core Duo" is a stupid name. Why does Intel have to be so different? "Core Duo" is a little confusing. Is Duo a code name? What?

    However, despite the stupid name, we've really turned a corner in performance. Intel can make a good CPU when they realized speed isn't the future. Looks like I should start considering replacing my old Pentium-M IBM T40p with the awesome battery life.

    AMD needs to respond in kind with a great new CPU. The future looks bright. Competition is once again is good for everyone.
  • LuxFestinus - Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - link

    The ambiguously gay duo, with Ace and Gary.:) An old SNL skit.
  • ksherman - Monday, December 19, 2005 - link

    Personally, i dont like that AMD is just sitting back, seemingly waiting for Intel to catch up... They need to kick Intel while their down. these new Processors from intel look really nice and i am likely to buy one, but in a mactel laptop. I am happy for INtel that they are catching up, but AMD really NEEDS to step up and do soemthing new.
  • Calin - Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - link

    AMD's income is lower than Intel uses for R&D. You really can't expect from AMD to develop something faster than Intel can.
    For AMD, to have an processor they could improve a step at a time since the introduction of the Athlon64/Opteron was a need - Intel is able to mantain several teams for microprocessor development, but AMD only has money for one. And AMD will milk the market for as much as possible, selling processors that are easy to make for prices that market will accept. If AMD will start selling a higher processor grade, they would need to reduce the price for lower speed processors. This is why the 2800+ and 3000+ are discontinued - they would have to sell them too cheap.

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