Sisoft Sandra 2009 SP2
Sisoft Sandra is a great synthetic benchmark suite that allows testing of numerous system components. I’ll be using the CPU Arithmetic, Cryptography, Memory Bandwidth and Memory Latency tests.
We’re using version 15.72, which is friendly to processors containing two, three or four cores.
When it comes to raw number crunching performance, Intel’s Core2 architecture still beats out the Phenom II by a pretty significant margin, particularly in Dhrystone ALU testing. The playing field is a little more even in Whetstone iSSE3 testing.
Although the E8400 is a powerful processor with a 3GHz clock speed and 6MB of fast L2 cache, it simply can’t keep up with the X3 720’s extra processing core. Although last year’s X3 8750 was a very close competitor to the E8400, there is no contest with the X3 720: The X3 720 simply has more horsepower.
As you can see, a very similar picture is painted with the Sandra Cryptography test.
When looking specifically at memory bandwidth, we see that AMD’s increase to the memory controller frequency has made some measurable improvements. Both the X3 720 and the X4 810 are right at the top of the pack.
When it comes to memory latency, we see a slight improvement with the AM3 processors in comparison to the X4 940, and a significant improvement over the first generation Phenom processors.
Intel’s E8400 and its large reserve of speedy L2 cache puts it in a very favorable light with small block sizes.
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