X-bit labs

Massive Attack: Performance Tests of 14 Processors Priced at $200+ (page 8)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Performance in Archiving Utilities

The results obtained in WinRAR are pretty interesting.  Among Intel processors the fastest ones in this type of tasks appeared Prescott based CPUs. The 90nm solutions owe this victory to enhanced data prefetcher, which is exactly what they need here. Prescott core outperforms not only Pentium 4 on the older Northwood, but also the CPUs from the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition family, which is a pure nonsense especially considering the price of the latter.

However, despite all these progressive data algorithms implemented in the new Prescott, Athlon 64 processors win in this test, because they boast the lowest latency during memory addressing.

The situation in another archiving utility, 7-zip is slightly different. It can be explained by the fact that the latest versions of 7-zip support multi-threading really efficiently. As a result, processors with Pentium 4 architecture compress the data much faster in 7-zip. Also I should again mention good performance of Prescott based CPUs, which proved 5-6% faster than the Northwood based ones working at the same clock frequencies.

When the data is extracted from archives in 7-zip, the situation with processors ranking appears absolutely different. All AMD processors outperform Intel’s solutions, and Prescott can’t boast the performance as high as in the two previous tests any more.