Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 - Yorkfield Has Landed
For our next round of synthetic benchmarks, we ran the CPU and Memory performance modules built into Futuremark's PCMark05 suite. The following tests are synthetic benchmarks designed to show relative performance metrics, but may or may not equate to "real-world" performance.
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"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 new Yorkfield-based Core 2 Extreme QX9650 showed a slight improvement over Intel's previous flagship quad-core desktop processor, the QX6850, in PCMark05's CPU performance module. The difference of 108 points in this test equates to an approximate 1.1% advantage for the QX9650, however, which is not significant in a benchmark like this one.
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"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 is affected not only by system memory bandwidth and latency, but by L2 cache performance as well. As such, the new Yorkfield-based Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 with its larger, 24-way set associative cache puts up a measurably better score than the similarly clocked QX6850. The QX9650's 174 point edge equates to a 2.7% increase in performance according to this test.
