Tom's CPU Architecture Shootout: 16 CPUs, One Core Each, And 3 GHz

Benchmark Results: Sandra 2010 Pro

Intel’s support for accelerating AES-based encryption and decryption in hardware (dubbed AES-NI) is impressive. The instructions allow properly-enabled processors to handle those tasks much faster than competing CPUs.

Overall, the Sandra test suite demonstrates the benefits of Intel's designs, though the dual-core Clarkdale configuration turns out to be fairly weak. We see the gains made possible by AES-NI, though, along with the rewards available to a powerful caching architecture.

However, Sandra also shows that the progress from one generation to the next has never been really significant with one exception: compared to all other CPUs, the Pentium 4 really was a loser.