Tyan Thunder i7500 (S2720) cont'd

Clibench Mk III SMP 0.7.15

CliBench has become one of our favorite benchmarking apps around here, so of course I had to include the latest version (0.7.15). This is one of the (very) few truly multi-threaded benchmarks available, and the results are accurate and reproducible. I split the graphs into two parts to make them easier to understand. Just for giggles, I ran the Xeon benches with 2 and 4 threads to see what effect hyper-threading had (if any).

Interesting to see the hyper-threading helping in most cases, but still coming up lacking. The Athlon MPs are still king of the FPU.

Notice how that memory benchmark slips with four threads running on the Xeons? Strange. As you can see, the Athlons and Xeons trade benchmark for benchmark in this round. Those Xeons are putting on a good show so far, let's see how they handle some scientific calculations...

Sciencemark MP

I was originally introduced to Sciencemark by Dr. Damage of Tech Report fame. This is a pretty serious benchmark that stresses every part of the memory/processor/chipset subsystems and it gives a very accurate picture of a system's processing prowess. I won't begin to try to explain what the tests actually do from a science point of view, because I'm not exactly sure that I know :-) If you're really interested, you can check this out for yourself.

The author of Sciencemark, Tim Wilkens, did hook me up with his MP version of the benchmark. While it is not truly multithreaded, it fires up one instance of the tests for each processor, presenting a parallel computing type of environment.

The Xeons smoke the Athlons in the Primodia test, but it doesn't quite make-up for the lackluster performance in the other two tests.

Advantage, Athlon MP (although not by much).

Cinebench, RC5 and LAME >>