Performance

Office and Content Creation Applications

So, first of all we decided to take a look at the performance of the new Pentium 4 3.06GHz with Hyper-Threading technology in classical tests.

SYSmark2002 models the work of an ordinary user in office and content creation applications. As we see, even in this case the Hyper-Threading technology involved can provide a certain effect on the performance: the increase makes about 3-5%. This performance gain appeared possible exactly due to the fact that a CPU with Hyper-Threading can simultaneously process two threads, and most contemporary applications are multi-thread ones. Moreover, Hyper-Threading can also prove efficient in single-thread applications, because the background threads belonging to the OS services can be performed in parallel to the major tasks processing.

In applications aiming at creating digital content Hyper-Threading provides a much higher positive effect in a system with PC1066 RDRAM. It can be explained by the fact that processing two threads at a time is more demanding towards the memory bandwidth, so that it becomes an evident bottleneck in a system with DDR333 SDRAM.

As we can notice from the results obtained in SYSmark2002, the competitors from AMD, Athlon XP CPUs, fall behind Intel Pentium 4. However, AMD has significant claims to the benchmark developers, BAPCO Company, accusing them of having optimized their benchmark for Intel Pentium 4 processors. Therefore, we have also used alternative tests from E-Testing Labs, which model the typical user work in office and content creation applications.

It is true, that Athlon XP is far not so slow in Business Winstone 2001. However, the new Pentium 4 3.06GHz is nevertheless faster than the top Athlon XP 2800+, no matter if the Hyper-Threading technology is enabled or not. Anyway, the performance gain Intel owes to the new technology here is not that impressive at all: it is less than 1%.

Content Creation Winstone 2002 is the first benchmark where Hyper-Threading technology doesn't speed up the process, but on the contrary, slows it down. We have already discussed the possible reasons of this earlier in the article.

Streaming Data Processing

The common data compression with WinRAR shows that Hyper-Threading is really efficient here: the performance improves by 3-5%. However, neither this performance gain, nor the core frequency increase up to 3.06GHz allow Pentium 4 processors to outpace their rival from AMD: Athlon XP 2800+. Nothing to be surprised at, actually: the data compression speed is very tightly connected with the memory subsystem bandwidth. And after the launching of the NVIDIA nForce2 Socket A chipset with 2 DDR SDRAM channels it appeared just dead frost to compete with Athlon XP systems in this parameter.

Sound encoding into mp3 format demonstrates clearly all the advantages of Hyper-Threading technology and NetBurst architecture of Intel Pentium 4 processors. Enabling Hyper-Threading here speeds up the sound processing by 8%. However, the LAME codec used here does support multi-threaded operations that is why this result is not at all surprising for us.

Video encoding is another type of tasks where Hyper-Threading technology is in the right place providing a 10% performance improvement. This can be explained in particular with the fact that the application used supports multi-threading.

Gaming Applications

As we can see, the performance of Pentium 4 processors in 3DMark2001 remains unchanged with Hyper-Threading and without it (the difference here lies within the measuring error). Of course, like most gaming applications 3DMark2001 doesn't support multi-threading, so that the new technology Pentium 4 boasts appears of absolutely no use.

The similar situation can be observed in Return to Castle Wolfenstein. However, in this game based on Quake3 engine Pentium 4 manages to outperform Athlon XP quite significantly even without the praised Hyper-Threading technology.

However, in the newest Unreal Tournament 2003 the situation is just the opposite. Athlon XP proves much faster than Pentium 4 despite the much higher actual working frequencies of the latter. Even the Hyper-Threading technology cannot help here, as the tests proved its absolute inefficiency in games.

3D Rendering

The performance gain provided by Hyper-Threading technology during the final rendering in 3ds max 5.0 appears really high and makes over 15%. This way, this gives us to understand very clearly that in case of proper optimization Hyper-Threading technology can be a real diamond.

The tests in Lightwave 7.4, however, also demonstrate just the opposite. Despite the fact that this application supports multi-threaded operations, Hyper-Threading appears almost completely inefficient here. It looks as if Lightwave creates several threads of similar instructions during the final rendering, so that they cannot be processed simultaneously by one processor.

We would also like to point out one more fact. Although final rendering is a purely computational task, which has always been a trump of Athlon XP processors, now the things changed. The matter is that the developers have little by little optimized the algorithms used in their test sets for SSE2 instructions, which is not supported by Athlon XP CPUs. As a result, the AMD processor lost its leadership here.

Scientific Applications

To test the performance of the new CPUs in scientific tasks we resorted to ScienceMark 2.0 test. This benchmark supports multi-threaded tasks, and all SIMD instructions, including MMX, 3DNow!, SSE and SSE2. The diagrams for ScienceMark show the time each CPU required to complete the tasks, so smaller value stands for higher performance.

It has been know for long that Athlon XP processors perform very well in physical modeling and cryptographic tasks. Here we see another proof of this fact. Hyper-Threading in this case also appears quite helpful improving the performance of the Pentium 4 processor by the good 17% in Molecular Dynamic Benchmark, where different threads perform calculations of different types. In the other two cases, the threads consist of similar instructions, so that the performance doesn't grow up that impressively any more.

Professional OpenGL Applications

Well, we have already pointed out the reasons of these results multiple times: the benchmarks algorithms are pretty outdated by now and do not involve SSE2 instructions. And in case of intensive calculations, Athlon XP remains an indisputable leader.

Moreover, we can observe the same "harmful" tendency in the tests of this set: Hyper-Threading slows down the processor. However, we didn't expect anything else, to tell the truth. The threads created by SPECviewperf 7.0 are very similar and struggle with one another for the same resources: OpenGL context.

Multi-Threading Tasks

As we have noticed, Hyper-Threading technology allows improving the performance in some multi-threaded tasks. However, it is evident that the maximum positive effect can be noticed in multi-threaded environments only when the applications utilize different processor resources. This organization of computing workload will allow involving the execution units of the physical CPU more efficiently. That is why we decided to test Pentium 4 3.06GHz with , Hyper-Threading technology in these conditions.

We used the following methodology. In a system with the CPU tested we started one of the five tasks, which load the processor quite heavily: WinRAR 3.0, FlasK 0.78.39/DiVX 5.02, 3ds max 5, Lighwave 7.5 or ScienceMark. At the same time, we started dm-antalus demo from Unreal Tournament 2003, where we measured the performance. As a result, we got the following numbers characterizing the performance of the system in Unreal Tournament 2003 in parallel with other different applications:

As we see, when there are two different applications running simultaneously, the system performance can be improved quite a lot due to Hyper-Threading. The maximum performance gain we managed to obtain was over 45%. However, as the practice showed, there are situations when the performance doesn't get any better even with the enabled Hyper-Threading. As we have already mentioned several times, everything depends on the type of applications working at a time and on the way they utilize the system resources. Although, we can also state that the average performance growth in multi-threaded tasks provided by Hyper-Threading makes the good 20-30%.

Also note that with enabled Hyper-Threading technology, Unreal Tournament 2003 running in parallel to some other applications works differently. Those of you who devote quite a lot of time to computer games know that it is usually almost impossible to play if there are any other applications running on the computer. The reason is very unstable work of the game, as the system needs to switch very often between the tasks, so that even though the average fps rate remains acceptable, it is almost impossible to enjoy the game. Hyper-Threading technology allows to eliminate this unpleasant effect almost completely. We didn't notice any "slowing down" in Unreal Tournament running in parallel to other activated applications. So, now you can play games when there are other applications working if you have a system with CPUs supporting Hyper-Threading technology.

Conclusion

Having launched a new Pentium 4 3.06GHz processor today, Intel not only raised the performance bar for its CPUs thus turning into a performance leader in the race with AMD, but also introduced an extremely interesting Hyper-Threading technology to the world.

In fact, it is still impossible to evaluate the cons and pros of Hyper-Threading to the full extent today. On the one hand, this technology will give green light to virtual dual-processor systems entering the market of high-performance home and office systems. The advantages of the technology are evident: the performance as well as response time when working with the existing applications get improved in most cases. However, there is always other side to the picture. Many contemporary tasks optimized for actual and not for virtual multi-processor configurations can be slowed down notably by Hyper-Threading technology. Besides, there are also quite many tasks, such as games, for instance, which performance does not depend on Hyper-Threading at all. Anyway, so far the advantages are dominating, so that the use of Hyper-Threading appears justified in most cases, if the system is not intended for any specific needs.

Another significant advantage of Hyper-Threading is a very slight die size increase. It means that the production of CPUs supporting this technology will hardly get much more expensive than the production of CPUs without Hyper-Threading. This way, Intel managed to increase the performance of its processors having paid very small price for that.

Unfortunately, the retail price of the new Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz is extremely high now and reaches $650. So, we wouldn't claim that the launching of the new CPU will influence the situation in the processor market in any way. At the same time, there should be much more Pentium 4 CPUs with Hyper-Threading next year, so that this technology gets every chance to finally become mass then.

The introduction of Hyper-Threading technology into mass processors also implies that the software will be now developed and optimized for it. And in its turn this will definitely make Intel Pentium 4 a much more attractive product very soon.