X-bit labs

Massive Attack: Performance Tests of 14 Processors Priced at $200+ (page 13)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 02/01/2004 | 12:02 PM ]

Performance during Software Development

Besides the already familiar benchmarks we have also included one new test in our today’s test session. Namely, we checked how fast our testing participants would compile the projects in Visual C++ .NET, which is a very popular software development interface. For our measurements we used the source code of the Emule client with the added source code for a few libraries necessary at the compilation stage: crypto51, CxImage, zlibstat. We measured the time in two compilation modes: “Debug” – the version with the debugging info included into the final code, and “Release” – creation of the final product with processing speed and code size.

First of all, I would like to say that Athlon 64 perform software compilation notably faster. Even Intel’s fastest Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz cannot compete with the leaders from AMD in this test. If we compare the performance of Pentium 4 processors on different cores, we will see that the leadership in this case belongs to Prescott, as it compilers faster.

Performance Summary

In order to sum up all the benchmark results in a more illustrative and easy to analyze way, we decided to split them according to the application type and calculate the average CPU performance coefficient for each type of tasks. This way, we will be able to show you what tasks this or that processor is best suited for.

The gigantic diagram below is the result of our attempt to make it easier :) Note that since the results in all tests are too different, we calculated the geometrical mean of the CPUs performance and then normalized the values taking the performance of Pentium 4 (Northwood) 3.2GHz as a reference point equal to 1. on the diagram below the higher is the value the better is the result.

I don’t think I need to comment on that.