X-bit labs

ASUS SK8N + AMD Opteron 144: Uniprocessor Workstation on AMD Opteron and NVIDIA nForce3 Professional (page 14)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 07/21/2003 | 05:53 PM ]

Besides the mathematical modeling tasks, ScienceMark 2.0 test package also contains one more interesting test aka BLAS. This benchmark, just like Linpack test, measures how quickly large floating-point matrices can be multiplied. However, in this case there are a few code versions compiled with various optimizations, which allows evaluating the efficiency of various processor units for this or that case.

We have already mentioned several times that AMD processors are fast at processing x87 operations. The three-pipeline FPU of Athlon XP and Opteron processors helps them to win in benchmarks dealing with floating-point numbers.

As for the SSE2 unit, which appeared in Opteron processors, it turns out not very fast, especially in vector operations. However, as soon as it comes to scalar operations, SSE2 of the Opteron processor helps it to defeat more than twice even the fastest Intel Pentium 4 CPUs. To be fair, we should say that scalar SSE2 operations do not occur very frequently.