Iwill DP400 (Cont'd)

Test Systems

Since this is my first i860 board review, I don't have any other i860 number to compare to. That being said, I do have some interesting number to present for comparison. I have it on pretty good authority that Intel's upcoming DDR "workstation" chipset is performing pretty much the same as their E7500 "server" chipset. From the sounds of it, Intel took the E7500 and added AGP 8x and called it "Placer" (or E7505, or E7507 depending on who you ask). With that in mind, I'll be presenting the benchmarks of an E7500 board (my full review here) for comparison, as well as AMD's current fastest 2P capable CPU, the 2200+ MP (my full review here). Hyperthreading was enabled on both dual Xeon systems for all tests.

	i860 Platform	E7500 Platform	MPX Platform
CPU(s)	Intel Xeon 2.4ghz (x2)	Intel Xeon 2.4ghz (x2)	AMD Athlon MP 1.8ghz/2200+ (x2)
Motherboard	Iwill DP400	Tyan Thunder i7500	MSI K7D Master L
Chipset	Intel i860	Intel E7500	AMD 760MPX
Memory	512mb Kingston PC800 ECC RDRAM (2x 256mb and 4x 128mb)	512mb Crucial PC2100 Reg'd ECC (2x 256mb)	512mb Crucial PC2100 Reg'd ECC (2x 256mb)
Storage	WD 1000JB "SE"	WD 1000JB "SE"	WD 1000JB "SE"
OS	WinXP Pro	WinXP Pro	WinXP Pro

Let's proceed to the benchmarks, shall we?

Sisoft Sandra 2002 Standard

I am still sticking with Sandra Standard 2002. I'm sure by now it is 20 something revisions behind the current version, but we like to keep standardized benchmarks around for a while so we can compare the results to older systems we might not have running anymore. As always, the results are used here strictly for comparison's sake. Synthetic benchmarks don't always give an accurate picture of real-world performance, but it's an easy way to see how one machine stacks-up against another in a variety of ways.

Sandra presents us with some interesting numbers here. You can obviously see that the RDRAM is faster than DDR on the Xeon paltforms, but the E7500 chipset does edge out the i860 in a few other tests. We'll see how that affects those real-world applications in a bit, but it's starting to show up here in Sandra right off the bat. The Athlons? Well, the Athlons put up a decent show, but when it comes to SIMD instructions (something Sandra takes advantage of), the Xeons and their SSE2 leave the Athlons in the dust. Remember though... Not everything is SSE2 optimized.

Clibench and Cachemem >>