AMD QuadFX Platform & FX-70 Series Processors
PCMark05: CPU and Memory
For our next round of synthetic benchmarks, we ran the CPU and memory performance modules built into Futuremark's PCMark05 suite.
|
|
"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. The CPU Test Suite also includes multithreading: two of the test scenarios are run multithreaded; the other including two simultaneous tests and the other running four tests simultaneously. The remaining six tests are run single threaded. Operations include, File Compression/Decompression, Encryption/Decryption, Image Decompression, and Audio Compression" - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.
The QuadFX FX-74 system put up the third highest score in PCMark05's CPU performance module, falling in between the Core 2 Duo E6700 and Core 2 Extreme X6800, and the other members of the FX-70 series follow suit right behind the FX-74.
What's interesting to note is how each quad-core platform scales at like clock speeds. In all of our graphs from this point forward, pay attention to the scaling between the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66GHz) and Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz), and between the QuadFX FX-72 (2.8GHz) and Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz). In this test, going from two to four cores on the Intel platform resulted in a 25.2% increase in performance; on the AMD platform the increase was "only" 23.4%.
|
|
"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing." - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.
PCMark05's memory performance module - when run under Windows XP - reported scores for the QuadFX platform that were significantly lower than anything else we tested. We suspect these results were related to QuadFX's non-unified memory architecture, so we also ran this test under Windows Vista. Under Vista, the QuadFX FX-75 platform put up a score of 4668, an increase of almost 1200 points, but that was still lower than the competition.
