X-bit labs

Intel V8 Eight-Core Platform Preview (page 7)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Performance

Synthetic Benchmarks: Sandra and Everest

First of all, we decided to run a few simple benchmarks from SiSoftware Sandra 2007 suite to get an idea of the performance level provided by an eight-core system. These performance tests can be very well split into parallel threads and the result reported by the utility can be easily compared with the corresponding readings for other similar systems.

In the arithmetic and multimedia tests Intel V8 system on two quad-core Xeon X5365 processors demonstrated unprecedented performance. No wonder: Xeon X5365 are the fastest quad-core Intel processors available today among the solutions on Core micro-architecture and in general among all solutions out there.

Intel V8 system performs very well in the tests that measures data transfer rate between the CPUs in the system. Of course, contemporary dual-socket systems benefit a lot from two independent 1333MHz busses. Besides, the chipset Snoop Filter also makes its positive contribution to the overall victorious result.

Unfortunately, we failed to get the memory tests from Sandra to run on Intel V8 system. Therefore, we resorted to Everest 4.0 utility to measure the practical bandwidth and latency of the memory subsystem built with FB-DIMMs.

Despite the impressive theoretical results demonstrated by the i5000X chipset, the practical situation is not that remarkable any more. Because of high latencies, FB DDR2 revealed relatively low practical results.

However, you should hardly pay that much attention to the results obtained in simple synthetic tests. Let’s move on to more complicated benchmarks and discuss the performance of Intel V8 platform in complex tests and real applications, including the ones dealing with media content creation and processing.