Audio Encoding

Lame was compiled from source without optimizations. We only ran ./configure and make, without any flags. We realize that some people would like to verify our binaries and sample files for their own benchmarks. In order to save bandwidth and prevent copyright infractions, we will provide our test files and binaries under limited circumstances to serious inquiries. We ran lame on a 700MB .wav file using the command equivalent to the one below:

# lame sample.wav -b 192 -m s -h >/dev/null

Encoding time, lower is better.

lame 1.96

POV-RAY

Although POV-RAY is limited in application (particularly when compared against Mental Ray), it does provide a free open source solution for basic rendering. POV-Ray 3.50c was our choice of render engine for this benchmark. For benchmark specifics, we run the exact benchmark as specified by the POV-Ray official site. We use the precompiled RPM for this test.

Render Time in Seconds, less is better.

POV-Ray 3.05c

POV-Ray does not have multithread support, so we were not surprised to see the HyperThreading configuration slowing down to the configuration without HT. We see the Athlon 64 processor pull way ahead; render tasks are extremely CPU and memory dependant. With the memory controller on the CPU, Athlon 64 becomes the stronger offering in this situation.

GZip

To throw in some rudimentary tests for GZip, we used the included GZip 1.3.5 to compress the .wav file from the benchmark above. We do not want to limit our I/O on writing to the hard drive, so the operation is performed as below:

# time gzip -c sample.wav > /dev/null

Gzip 1.3.5

Intel wins their first bout of the analysis, albeit not by much. We will find a recurring pattern later on with integer based calculations and the Nocona Xeon processor. The entire Prescott family of Intel CPUs received a dedicated integer multiplier rather than continually using the floating point multiplier. This becomes extremely useful in some of our other benchmarks.


Database Performance

We will run the standard SQL-bench suite included with RPM MySQL 4.0.20d.

MySQL 4.0.20d - Test-Select

MySQL 4.0.20d - Test-Insert

Of all our benchmarks, the SQL-bench becomes the most baffling. The extremely threaded database application performs particularly poorly with HyperThreading enabled. The Althon 64 outperforms Intel again in this benchmark, and a lot of it is almost certainly accredited to the on die memory controller again.
Update: We copied the 32-bit marks from our benchmark in previous testing instead of the 64-bit. You can view the previous articles here from a month ago. The graphs have also been updated.
Index Synthetic Benchmarks
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  • manno - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    Come on people this is Anandtech, have they ever appeared to be anything, but honest, and unbiased in their reviews? These are the number they got using these benchmarks. They did the work, and gave you the numbers. This site isn't here to advertise for AMD, or Intel. They give you the information, and you use it as a tool for you own purposes from there. I mean come on take of your uniforms, and accept what you see in front of you. This should be looked at as a favor. I don't see any other sites posting benches of Intel's EM64T chips, do you? You came to this site by choice, they don't charge you dime one for the service they provide, and you get pissed at them for not bending the truth so you can to advance your own personal agenda.

    Say thank you, and be on your way.

    These guys work hard, and they do a fantastic job supplying the enthusiast community with some of the best benchmark numbers around. They just posted numbers showing that EM64T is a huge step forward in terms of P4 performance. So what? If you want to buy an A64 or P4 Prescott and get worse performance in those benches then go out and buy one. I was just about tho buy a some PC's for the office here, and they were all going to have A64's in them. Thanks to Kristopher I've decided to sit on the fence a little longer.

    Again Thanks for the early release, it really and truly helped. I hope these fanboy's don't affect you decision to post early numbers in the future.

    -manno
  • WizzBall - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    Is this what you call these days a *benchmark*? Just wondering... o.O
  • nastyemu25 - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    hello. someone effed up :(
  • coldpower27 - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    Not a bad article, though it might have been better if an Opteron 150 was benched which is priced @ 637US or the Athlon FX 53 @ 827US those would be closer in comparison to the Pentium 4 3.6 Nocona EM64T

    Though eventually a fairer comparison would be the Pentium 4 3.6F vs the Athlon 64 3500+ or Athlon 64 3700+. You could also throw in the Pentium 4 3.4F and Athlon 64 3400+.

  • noxipoo - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    at least compare the same thing, if you don't have the same class CPU for testing THEN DON'T POST THE ARTICLE.
  • tpinckney - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    Given the numerous errors in this article, I believe it is prudent that it be removed from Anandtech.

    This ludicrous article has damaged my opinion of Anandtech.
  • SKiller - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    Wow... and a big fat Intel ad at the bottom of the article. Never thought I'd see the day.
  • manno - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    Good review, thanks for the early benchmark release. I'm not going to lie to you I like AMD, and I own a bunch of Athlon 64s. But before I think I'll hold off on buying any new hardware until I get to see how well these new P4's do. Any chance we can get some Doom 3 numbers up? Again thanks for giving us the heads up. Looks like things could start heating up in the Chip market soon!

    -manno
  • peter79 - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    wow intel fanboy alert.
    I also joined the forum just to post here.

    Numerous forums are all comenting on this article. Anand's is even compared by some to THG. So I think an update is appropriate here. A delete to.

    T8000, maybe you should read some of those comments, you would discover that , compared to an opteron, results would be very different. Results that aren't even correct btw. And that the benchmark choice is awfull.
  • redpriest_ - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    The gcc options used don't generate 64-bit binaries.

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