Benchmarking Core Duo 2 vs Amd X2 64bit?

[linmias]

Hi all!

When benchmarking CPU's what consideration is taken regarding how the benchmarking programs is compiled and optimized for specific architectures? At microsoft channel9 the VC++ compiler team member described that no optimizations where made for dual core check this video link Channel9 VC++ compiler backend

Therefore I think benchmarking a cpu should be done in an optimized way. Anyone knows about the differences in VC++ compiler and the Intel C++ compiler? Has Amd an own c++ compiler that optimizes for their own architecture?

How does Conroe VS AMD x2 perform in 64 bit environments with optimized benchmarking programs? That would be interesting to know, their FULL potential...

 

[K8MAN]

Those of us who have purchased A64's in the past 3 years are anxiously awaiting the performance increase from 64bit vista with optimized 64bit programs. We'll let you know when we know ourselves. Great thing is every A64 ever made is 64bit so we'll have a huge sample for results. Conroe's 64bit is an unknown factor right now. I imagine it is still using AMD64 extention's though.

 

[K8MAN]

Yep, nice three year interest free loan you provided...

:roll:

So your saying I should have invested in a energy money-pit from intel instead? That doesnt make much sense.

 

[mebethekoko]

Here's a link to a preview of Clovertown (translated by Google). If you look at the screen shot of the Cinebench, you can see it says 64bit version. It get's a 362 in the single threaded. That link from Jumping Jack looks legit too. But keep in mind that that bench was done on a Memron that was OC'ed ~50%.

 

[spud]

Yep, nice three year interest free loan you provided...

:roll:

So your saying I should have invested in a energy money-pit from intel instead? That doesnt make much sense.

I do beleive he is getting at the fact the purchase of your A64 shouldn't have been around the 64bit aspect as soo much as the K8's superiority over Netburst.

 

[K8MAN]

Yep, nice three year interest free loan you provided...

:roll:

So your saying I should have invested in a energy money-pit from intel instead? That doesnt make much sense.

I do beleive he is getting at the fact the purchase of your A64 shouldn't have been around the 64bit aspect as soo much as the K8's superiority over Netburst.
Which makes me angry because I never purchased it for that reason along with most others. There seems to be a certain bunch of individuals on here seem to think otherwise. It was and still is simply faster and cooler than any P4. The 64bit is a bonus which will help extend the life of a good percentage of the machines sold in the past 3 years to vista and beyond.

 

[theaxemaster]

To be fair it isn't really AMD's fault that the primary OS in the market has never really put any weight behind the 64 bit architecture. They swear by backwards compatibility too much for that, and the other software companies follow suit.

 

[Action_Man]

I'm going to go with K8MAN on this one.

 

[Action_Man]

Fair enough but its one of those things thats going to take some time for it to be utilised. I'd liken it to ATI and their quality dynamic branching on their X1k cards.

 

[mebethekoko]

The way I see that overclocked Memrons performance compared to the non-OC'ed Woodcrest benchmarks (as the also had a multithreaded bench) is that the Conroe is getting limited by the FSB. Hence why it scales so well when the FSB was OC'ed. But that's just shooting in the dark.

As far as the usefulness of 64bit, I would have to disagree with you. Sure support sucks, but I find that Windows Pro x64 to be much better of an OS then 32bit Pro. I don't use it on my system, because I've got a 5 year old processor in this rig. But I've built computers for some of my family members and thus have a lot of exposure to x64. And it is a faster OS. Has better memory management. In the old day's I liked that software wasn't compatible with it, because a lot of spyware didn't work in x64. Those were good times. Of course there's no benchmark to measure the general performance of the OS (GUI performance and what not).

And if you don't think 64bit wont become important in the future, you're sorely mistaken. Current 32bit XP can't effectively use more then 2 gigs of RAM. If there's one trend I've noticed in the IT world that never changes, its bloat. My next computer will have 4 gigs of RAM, no doubt about that in my mind. Weither it's a Conroe system or a AMD64 system is something I'll wait to decide upon.

 

[mebethekoko]

Oh, sorry that I thought you were one of those 64 bit is not needed folks.

As for AMD introducing 64bit to the desktop market, you have to keep in mind it's the same processor they made for their server market. It wouldn't have made sense for them to develop another processor for the desktop market.

To get back on topic: If these benchmarks are any indication of Conroe's performance in 64bit, then Intel did a good job. P4s suffered running 64bit code, whereas AMD64s usually ran 64 bit code faster then 32 bit (provided graphics drivers and all that didn't mess with the performance). That Woodcrest 2.0 Ghz single thread test is right about where a AMD64 2.0 Ghz is in terms of performance. While that might not sound great, it just goes to show that at the very least Conroe doesn't lose performance under 64 bit. Of course this is just one benchmark, and by no means the last word. But it looks like we'll have a nice CPU fight coming up.

 

[iterations]

Some more Merom/Conroe 64-bit benchmarks:

OS: Win XP 64-bit edition.

Merom @ 3.2GHz 3dMark05: 18559
http://coolaler.kj.idv.tw/merom/QLZT/XP64/3.gif

Merom @ 3.2GHz 3dMark05 CPU Test: 11212 <-- holy crap.
http://coolaler.kj.idv.tw/merom/QLZT/XP64/4.gif

Merom @ 3.2GHz 3dMark01SE: 54724
http://coolaler.kj.idv.tw/merom/QLZT/XP64/1.gif

Merom @ 3.2GHz 3dMark03: 36000 <-- 8O
http://coolaler.kj.idv.tw/merom/QLZT/XP64/2.gif

 

[K8MAN]

Will 32bit CPU's have any issues running more flash memory as part of the superfetch feature of vista? IE could you stick 4gig's of flash mem in a 32bit p4 system with 2gig's of real ram and have it utilize it all?

 

[iterations]

You must have a special script that issues a bone jarring page to some pager everytime a Conroe bench appears .... interesting data.

Jack

Finger on the pulse my friend...

 

[K8MAN]

Three years seems a long time to wait to take full advantage of your CPU

Some more adventurous guys have shown alot of potential with x86-64 based linux distro's and I myself have been using 64bit XP for a long while and will be getting the 64bit version of the newest build of vista as soon as I get a blank DVD to test it for myself. I say we have been waiting anxiously because we've been waiting for Intel, MS and the rest of the industry to catch up because it is out of our power to make anything happen.

 

[Action_Man]

And you bring up a good point, the question is "is 3 years too long"?

In this case I would say no. Its guaranteed to be used. I also doubt they'd have done anything useful with the extra transistors required. They'd probably have saved them.

I have been pounding this pretty good, AMD did the right thing.... they did. Here is where it turned to their favor -- AMD did it and kept backward compatibility -- which sorta sealed it don't you think?

Exactly.

But during a conversion like this, if you make your backward compatibility sooo good, there is not as much motivation to move forward eh?

Ah but we have motivations.

 

[iterations]

Indeed it is great either way. I'm looking forward to reviewing some of the retail motherboards that support more overclocking features. And hopefully a multiplier unlocked Core 2 Extreme.

Anyways back on topic, here is a really interesting comparison that Coolaler did. Here is SuperPi on the same processor and clockspeed (3.01GHz), same memory timings, same SuperPi executable, but one is one WinXP Pro and one is on WinXP 64.

32-bit: 16.859 <-- http://www.coolaler.net/conroe/42.gif

64-bit: 16.719 <-- http://coolaler.kj.idv.tw/conroe/XP64/xp64_7.gif

So we even see a slight improvement just from moving to a 64-bit OS in the benchmark. It certainly appears that Conroe/Merom do not have a hobbled 64-bit implementation.

 

[BaronMatrix]

To be fair it isn't really AMD's fault that the primary OS in the market has never really put any weight behind the 64 bit architecture. They swear by backwards compatibility too much for that, and the other software companies follow suit.

Yeah, and it is fair to point out a general lack of industry support at the driver level -- most all companies will put resources into projects when there is a clear path to ROI (return on investment), for 64-bit most (including MS) did not see the ROI.

MS did the same to Intel on 64-bit as well only sporting out one version of IA-64 for Itanium, then dropping all support for it.

In short, Intel was of the mind 3 years ago that 64-bit was the future just the future several years out, AMD was of the mind that 64-bit was needed immediately, i.e. when Athlong 64 came out.... recall the bickering in the press ... Intel was correct, but AMD did a good job marketing the performance of 32-bit.

Just curious, how well do you think the first spin of Athlon 64's might run Window's Vista and the associated DX10 games K8MAN refer's to?

Jack



Actually, MS released 3 versions (Server, Ent server, Pro) for Itanium and dropped support for Pro. True though because Intel didn't create X64, Dell didn't push it.

 

[Action_Man]

This is where you and I disagree, and I respectfully disagree -- a CPU made 3 years ago (say an Athlon 64 2400+) may run Vista, but not well. A CPU made a year ago (Athlon 64 X2 3800+ or better, a P4 D 3.2 G or better) will run vista well so then yeah. But each time Vista get's pushed out, the worst it gets for the 64 bit fans.

Define run well. Without it being finished and benchmarked we can't really say would could and what couldn't.

And is it really a guarantee?

Yes. XP-64 has good gains with 64bit apps, booting up alone is much faster.

I mean, AMD is already talking about extra 64-bit instructions -- what if they do it, Vista depends on it, then it renders all previous CPU's inoperable -- unlikely true, but not impossible.

Well I'll wait and see on that one.

 

[K8MAN]

Yes. XP-64 has good gains with 64bit apps, booting up alone is much faster.

Correct
The little blue loading bar goes about a 1/3(2 seconds?) of the way across on mine and then goes straight into windows. XP32 on the same machine takes 5-10 seconds on that screen.

 

[iterations]

Hmm, I agree that 64-bit windows in better in many ways, but I've seen traces of WinXP boot path workloads, and I'm pretty sure it is largely limited by harddrive thrashing during that stage of boot (when it is showing the blue bar). I can't back that up, just thought I'd mention it. That is when many of the drivers are being read from disk and loaded right?

It is nuts how much the harddrive access pattern during winXP boot looks like random reads (geometrically). It is devious, I would think that MS would have worked on the data layout a bit better for boot.

 

[Action_Man]

The little blue loading bar goes about a 1/3(2 seconds?) of the way across on mine and then goes straight into windows. XP32 on the same machine takes 5-10 seconds on that screen.

About that (been a while since I used it). A friend of mine got it and told me and I told him he was full of sh!t. Got a copy from work and I took it home and tried it out and was very impressed.

By well, I mean put windows XP on a 1 GHz CPU with 512 Meg of ram. My neighbor works for a small developer who is on the beta-XP program

Beta vista you mean? Its memory limited rather then cpu, especially with all the useless bs like superfetch chugging all the memory.

 

[Action_Man]

I'd did a fair bit of testing with regards to memory. You need twice as much memory as you do with XP to get the same amount of performance.

So for example 512 on Vista is like 256 on XP. 1GB is like 512 and so on.

I did that on my AXP 2600 (@ stock), A64 3000 (@ stock), A64 3500 (@ 2.6) and a P4c 2.4 (@ 3.0).

 

[Action_Man]

The fact that 3 years has passed and 64-bit computing is still in the back alley corners of the enthusiast community is decent evidence as such.

Well that's Microsoft's (and to a lesser extent Intel's) fault. The hardware is there we just need some software.

 

[K8MAN]

If it werent for the greedy memory maker's keeping prices high for a couple of years in a row 64bit may have taken off as more people would have had access to more memory.