Date:
Monday , April 04, 2005
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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Pentium Dual Core Preview

A preview of the Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840. We give you some thoughts, impressions, and feedback on working with Intel's first dual core processor and what it brings to the table.

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Intel 840 Processor Performance

Truly evaluating a dual core processor could seem a bit tricky, but it is really quite simple. One has to simply take multithreaded applications and run benchmarks on them. The ugly part of that is that there are very very few multithreaded desktop applications. There are a few applications that we can point to, but overall multithreaded applications basically reside in the realm of video content creation, image manipulation, and audio content creation.

Now on the synthetic benchmark side of the issue, there are certainly some benchmarks that show advantages, but when trying to subscribe to real world tangible advantage formatting, it gets quite difficult to show benefits of dual core processors.

Memory Performance

One synthetic benchmark that we do find valuable, is SiSoft Sandra’s memory bandwidth benchmark. This benchmark is based on the Stream benchmark built years ago, that has basically gone unchanged.

Remember that with our dual core Intel 840 processor has an 800MHz Front Side Bus and a 667MHz DDR2 memory bus, the memory bus is being shared between both cores. Compared to a dual processor system, which would have one physical set of memory for each processor in the case of AMD's Opteron, our Intel 840 processor must share its one set of physical Ram between both processor cores on its single die. (In most Intel servers a bus is shared to a shared set of memory. Most dual processor systems do have independent busses to the memory controller.)

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As you can see, physical memory set sharing and memory latencies do certainly come into play with the dual core architecture of the Intel 840. Interesting to note though, the 4313MB/s second score of the Intel 840 is only about 10% slower than when the original Prescott 3.2GHz Pentium 4 was launched using DDR-400 on the i875 chipset. All of this would seem to foreshadow the dual core Intel 840 being slower in single threaded applications that are memory intensive than the original 3.2GHz Pentium 4.

(Intel notes that we should be seeing score around 4700MB/sec on the i955X motherboard, however we could not get our system to be this responsive.)

Gaming Performance

How exactly does our Intel 840 stack up against a similarly clocked machine? Comparing our Intel 840 against a 3.2GHz Prescott core Pentium 4 processor, we see a glaring similarity.

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As you might guess, we see our scores come in side by side, being almost identical. We could show you this over and over but the pattern remains static in our gaming benchmarks.

Gaming Performance with Dual Usage

What if we take the same setup and place a workload on the CPU such as a DivX encode and then run our gaming benchmark? Remember that current Dr. DivX 1.06 is lightly multithreaded, so it will take up some workload on both cores.

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While there is obviously a frame rate hit in our game, anyone that has ever done video encoding on a desktop computer will probably find this amazing that we could run the benchmark at all. While our game is not as fast, it is certainly “playable.”

Video Encoding Performance

We looked at several raw encoding scenarios. Using Windows Movie Maker we saw encoding up to 23% faster compared to our 3.73GHz / 925XE system. Using Windows Media Encoder with “Advanced Profile,” Intel reported reduced rendering times of up to 42%. Intel also reported reduced rendering times of 59% using Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5.

Using a workload housed in Worldbench 5, we settled on a scripted “real world” evaluation of a movie making experience. This workload below represents using the software to put your movie together, make titles, and edit scenes, then render the movie to your final file format.

This graph is in seconds and lower is better.

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Albeit, this is a very short film and creation process, our Intel 840 dual core processor saved us 1 minute and 16 seconds overall. This represents a time savings of a little over 20%. Watching the workload many times over and going in and editing movies ourselves, the only difference we ever really saw was in the process time which might be as suspected. Do keep in mind that our newer Intel 840 is also using a slower bus speed and slow clock speed.

Also Interesting to watch is how exactly the threading on the both of the processors is being utilized. Keep in mind that while Windows see a HyperThreaded virtual processor as adding 100% more scaling to the mix, which is hardly true.

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You will easily be able to differentiate the 3.73GHz Pentium 4 from the Intel 840 processor simply by the number of CPUs shown in the Task Manager Performance Window.

Intel Reported Benchmarks

While we usually do not regurgitate benchmarks handed to use from technology companies, we are going to make an exception this time. Although I do not see these benchmarks as having and impact on your tangible computing experience (except for DOOM 3 if you are a gamer), there are many that do see the value in some of these synthetic benchmarks.

Industry Standard Benchmarks

Intel Pentium 4 Processor with HT

Technology Extreme Edition 3.73GHz

Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition

840

Measured Improvement

BAPCo SYSMark 2004

231

232

1.00

DOOM 3

97.5

87

0.89

Cinebench 2003

66.7

43.0

1.55

SPECint_base2000

1781

1461

0.82

SPECfp_base2000

1997

1662

0.83

SPECint_rate

base2000

22.9 (2 copies)

33.1 (4 copies)

1.45

SPECfp_rate

base2000

23.8 (2 copies)

30.5 (4 copies)

1.28

What you are probably most likely to take away from this if you are familiar with the spec benchmarks, is that our Intel 840 dual core processor is truly acting much like a traditional Symmetric Multi Processor system.