Exploring Hyper-Threading Performance - Test Systems and Benchmarks
Published on 2004-01-07 13:44:04 By: Jim_
Shuttle FB75 The memory used in the Pentium 4 test system was
supplied graciously by Kingston.
I've used memory from every major player in the industry over
the years and this stuff ranks right at the top. It's been fantastic
for me. This is generally
the point of an article or review where I'm rubbing my hands together
with glee preparing to compare two or more impressive systems.
In this case, we'll try not to compare the performance of the
Xeons with that of the Pentium 4 test system as we're interested
in the trends (if any) in our benchmarking suite when hyper-threading
is enabled and disabled. You never know, maybe we'll encounter
something interesting.
What benchmarks
are we going to look at today?
Xeon Test
System
Pentium
4 Test System
CPU(s)
Intel Xeon
2.8GHz (x2)
Intel Pentium
4 3.2GHz
Motherboard
MSI
E7505 Master 2-F
Chipset
Intel E7505
Intel i875P
Memory
4x 256MB
Crucial PC2700
2x 512MB
Kingston PC4000
Storage
Western
Digital 800JB
Western
Digital 400JB
OS
Windows
XP, SP1
Windows
XP, SP1
-
Sisoft Sandra CPU
- Sisoft Sandra CPU Multi-Media
- Sisoft Sandra Memory
- Cinebench 2003 Rendering
- DVD Encoding performance
- PCMark 2004
I would have liked to add some real game benchmarks to our suite for this article but unfortunately the only video card I have available to me right now is an old Elsa Quadro SDR. I doubt anyone really wants to see it struggle along.
All the benchmarks, save our DVD encoding benchmark, are readily available so that you can all try this on your own with your Xeons and P4Cs. Let's get started.
Sandra's CPU benchmark is obviously quite optimized for hyperthreading at this point, and the numbers certainly show that. We see an average improvement of ~52.5% when hyper-threading is enabled on the P4 and an average improvement of ~28% with the Xeons. In the Dhrystone ALU, performance seemingly lags behind a little bit when HT is enabled but I could probably chalk that small percentage up to human error.
As expected another win for hyper-threading. We see an average improvement of ~36% on the P4 and ~34% on the Xeons. Next!
Given that we've already talked about how hyper-threading is a constant struggle for access to resources (execution units, cache and time on the bus to hit system memory) a memory benchmark might prove useful in our analysis. As such, here we are! Unfortunately the results don't really jump out at us. Hyper-threading doesn't seem to have much of an impact on overall memory throughput, as it shouldn't.
Let's move on to a few more interesting results.
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