CC820 Performance Expectations

When I received the CC820 board I knew for sure that the memory translator hub would hinder the performance. The MTH acts just as a language translator would if you were giving a presentation to an audience that doesn't speak your native language. I've had several experiences giving presentations to a non-English speaking audience through a translator. It takes some getting used to. First you rattle off a few sentences. Then you wait patiently while the translator communicates your words to the audience in their native language. Needless to say, it takes more time to pass on your information since your words have to be recompiled by the translator to another language. The same scenario is true for the 82805 MTH-chip. It has to take the data that was prepared for RDRAM and translate it for SDRAM memory. I figured that the performance of the CC820 platform would be a bit slower than an equivalently setup 440BX.

Comparing Intel's CC820 Platform Performance

I thought it would be interesting to compare the performance of the CC820 to the RDRAM based VC820, a 440BX motherboard and a VIA Apollo Pro 133 Plus platform. Each of the boards was run with a Pentium III 600 MHz processor, 128 MB of main memory, Western Digital AC418000 UDMA Hard disk, and an NVIDIA GeForce 256 DDR reference board. The test suite included, SYSmark98 under Window98 and NT, and Quake III Arena Test (DEMO1 & DEMO2) along with Descent III. This suite of tests should give us a great idea of the overall real world performance each of the platforms has to offer. Each of the 3D gaming applications was run at 640x480x16 resolution. The reason we only run this lower resolution is to eliminate the graphics board as the bottleneck, since our goal is to show the performance differences in the platforms. If higher resolutions were run on each of the platforms then all of the scores would end up being the same due to the limitation of the graphics adaptor.