X-bit labs

Intel V8 Eight-Core Platform Preview (page 6)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 05/18/2007 | 06:57 PM ]

Testbed and Methods

It is actually pretty hard to find worthy competitors to Intel V8 system. It is the first solution for enthusiasts that features eight processor cores located in two physical processors. Therefore, we think that we shouldn’t get very deep into investigating the performance of this system now that the successor to AMD Quad FX platform, the new FASN8 on Phenom FX processors is not out yet. It is evident that the eight-core system based on Core micro-architecture will outperform quad-core systems in all applications that are capable of paralleling the computational threads efficiently.

Nevertheless, we still decided to compare the performance of our today’s hero, Intel V8 platform, against that of the existing AMD Quad FX version and at the same time against that of a system based on one quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6800 processor.

As a result, we built a few test systems using the following equipment:

• CPUs:
• AMD Athlon 64 FX-74 (Socket 1207, 3.0GHz, 2x1MB L2);
• Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 (LGA775, 2.93GHz, 1067MHz FSB, 2x4MB L2);
• Intel Xeon X5365 (LGA771, 3.0GHz, 2x4MB L2).
• Mainboards:
• ASUS L1N64-SLI WS (Dual Socket 1207, NVIDIA nForce 680a SLI);
• EVGA 122-CK-NF67-A1 (LGA775, NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI);
• Intel Workstation Board S5000XVN (Dual LGA771, Intel 5000X).
• Memory:
• 4 x 1GB DDR2-800 SDRAM 4-4-4-12-1T (OCZ DDR2 PC2-9200 FlexXLC Edition);
• 4 x 1GB FB DDR2-667 SDRAM 5-5-5-15 (Samsung PC2-5300 FB-DIMM);
• Graphics card: PowerColor X1900 XTX 512MB.
• Hard drive: Western Digital WD1500AHFD.
• OS: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate (x64).

The tests were performed with the BIOS Setup of the tested mainboards adjusted for maximum performance. Also note that according to the manufacturers’ recommendations for Quad FX system in Vista OS we set Node Interleaving parameter to Disable.

We used 64-bit versions of all applications where it was possible.

The diagrams below will depict results of four different platforms: Intel V8 with two Xeon X5365 processors; Intel V8 with one Intel Xeon X5365 processor; AMD Quad FX with two Athlon 64 FX-74 processors and a system with one Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 processor.