X-bit labs

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processors: Quad-Core CPUs Gone Real! (page 4)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 11/01/2006 | 10:31 PM ]

Performance

SYSMark 2004 SE: General Performance

The first test we performed let us make very precise conclusions about the quad-core CPUs. These processors are definitely faster than the dual-core CPUs. And this performance advantage is first of all noticeable in digital content creation and processing tasks. In fact this is quite natural. Most applications of the kind are optimized from multi-threading prospective, therefore Core 2 Extreme QX6700 appears almost 8% faster than Core 2 Extreme X6800, even though the dual-core CPU works at 10% higher clock speed.

As for the performance in typical office applications, the results demonstrated by Kentsfield are not as rosy anymore. The workload in office applications is very rarely multi-threaded, so the performance can hardly be increased by adding a few more cores. By the way, I would like to remind you that when we transition from single-core processors to dual-core ones, the Office Productivity index in SYSMark 2004 SE still rises. In other words, these data suggest that it doesn’t make any sense to use more than two processor cores in office applications.

Synthetic Benchmarks: PCMark05 and 3DMark06

The popular PCMark05 benchmark does support multi-threading, however, it implies not only the ability to process two computational threads simultaneously. There are two subtests included in this benchmarking suite that create four simultaneous threads. As a result, Kentsfield shows better performance index in this benchmark than any dual-core processor.

The victory in 3DMark06 results from the processor subtest that affects the total score significantly. The results of the CPU test are given on the second diagram. This test uses multi-core architecture to calculate physics and AI for multiple objects interacting with one another. Of course, a task like that can be easily split into several parallel threads, and the obtained results prove this point very well.