X-bit labs

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Dual-Core Processor Review (page 9)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 05/08/2005 | 09:11 PM ]

Performance in PCMark04, 3DMark 2001 SE and 3DMark05

We decided to take a separate look at the performance of our Athlon 64 X2 processor in the popular synthetic benchmarks from Futuremark.

As we have already mentioned a few times earlier, PCMark04 test is optimized for multi-threaded systems. Therefore, Pentium 4 processors with Hyper-Threading technology have always performed better in this test than Athlon 64 CPUs. Now the situation has changed. Two physical cores of the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ processor put it on top of the hill.

The graphics tests from the 3DMark benchmarks do not support any type of multi-threading. That is why the results shown by Athlon 64 X2 are hardly any different from those of the regular Athlon 64 processors working at 2.4GHz. A slight advantage over the Athlon 64 4000+ can be explained by the enhanced memory controller of the new Toledo core, and the advantage over Athlon 64 3800+ - by large cache memory.

However, there are a few tests in the 3DMark05 set that can actually take advantage of multi-threading support. In these tests the CPU is performing software emulation of vertex shaders, while the second thread is calculating the physics for the gaming environment.

The results are quite logical. If the application can use two processor cores simultaneously, then the dual-core CPUs will definitely perform faster than the single-core ones.