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 multi-core aware and dual, triple and quad core friendly.
As you can see, the Phenom II processors have quite a bit of processing power on tap when all four cores are utilized. Intel’s Core 2 Quad processors have proven to be real monsters when it comes to raw mathematical computation, and takes a significant lead in the Dhrystone ALU test when compared clock-per-clock to the Phenom II. When it comes to the Whetstone FPU test, the Phenom II is about at par clock-per-clock to the Core 2 Quad. As expected, we see very little difference when comparing the Phenom II to its predecessor. This is due to most of Phenom II’s changes being related to memory latency and capacity and not core efficiency.
We see an almost identical trend in the cryptography benchmark but with a larger delta between the Phenom II and the Phenom at equal clock speeds.
Thanks to many of the changes in the 45nm Phenom II, memory bandwidth has increased substantially. We see a healthy gain of about 1.5GB/s compared to the 65nm Phenom. Due to the off-board memory controller, the Core 2 Quad can’t compete in terms of memory bandwidth and weighs in at less than half that of the Phenom II.
The Phenom II’s memory latency is also quite good across the board. Intel’s very large and very fast L2 cache keeps latency very low until the test block size exceeds about 4MB.
When comparing a Phenom 9350e to an equally clocked Phenom II, we can see some significant latency improvements. The large boost in L3 keeps latency below 30ns up until about 6MB. Some of the other efficiency improvements also appear to have reduced main memory latency by about 10ns as well.
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