Results: SiSoftware Sandra
Despite its older CPU architecture, the extra cores enabled on last quarter's System Builder Marathon machine push it beyond today's Haswell-based system in SiSoftware Sandra's Arithmetic module. Those extra processing resources were the reason I chose to go with Ivy Bridge-E.
Granted, the results from Sandra aren't used in our final price/performance calculations. But our benchmark suite does have a few tests in it that benefit from the same six-core configuration.
The old machine also looks great in Sandra's Cryptography test, which taxes memory bandwidth and favors a quad-channel controller for AES encryption/decryption. Notice that today's build achieves higher hashing scores though, thanks to optimizations for Haswell's more modern instruction support.
The previous machine’s quad-channel memory controller also offers twice the theoretical bandwidth of its dual-channel replacement. We're curious to see how this effects real-world applications.
