SiSoft Sandra 2009
As always, we’ll start off with some theoretical benchmarks courtesy of SiSoft Sandra. SiSoft have just released version 2009, so that’s what we’ll be using. 2009 introduces a couple of new tests that benchmark a CPU’s performance in cryptography and hashing.
SiSoft Sandra 2009 will serve the purpose of giving us raw benchmark results based on pure calculation power. It is able to isolate different aspects of performance, with varying degrees of acceleration by instruction sets – from floating-point to integer calculations, to encryption/decryption, and pure memory bandwidth performance. From there, we can compare the results to more real-world applications.
Core i7 is off to an incredible start, with ‘raw’ arithmetic performance scaling well beyond price. Keep in mind that matching colours in our graphs represent similarly priced products. I felt that I should remind our readers of this, because as you can see, it is not going to be apparent in the results!
Again, the scaling here is incredible. By waiting for Nehalem and spending a bit more on the CPU and platform, you will be calculating floating point at twice the speed! What that means for real-world, we’ll find out soon…
Finally, we are seeng some results that are more related to pure clock speed than anything – and even the Phenom is able to keep up. I’m not sure why this is the case – as you’ll find out as you go on with the review, this kind of result is somewhat rare.
And there you have a case for just how much more bandwidth is offered by an on-chip memory controller and direct interface to the chipset.
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