AMD's 760 Chipset: DDR for the Athlon is here

This test basically attempts to simulate the 1994 Northridge Earthquake aftershock in the San Fernando Valley of SoCal. The benchmark does give the Intel CPUs quite a bit of an advantage, requiring the AMD 760 before the Athlon can even begin to compete. This continues to illustrate the point that VIA has been holding the Athlon's performance back by a considerable amount.

Once again we see that with aggressive compiler optimizations the Athlon can gain a noticeable lead over the Pentium III, however when looking at relatively unoptimized scores the Athlon's performance isn't too spectacular. This is one benefit Intel gets out of having their own C/C++ and Fortran compilers whereas AMD has to rely on Intel's compilers as well as Compaq's Visual Fortran.

The Face Recognition benchmark is quite possibly one of the most interesting benchmarks in the FP suite of SPEC CPU2000. It essentially involves converting a photograph of a face into a set of graphs (with values representing mathematical equivalentes of features of the face) and probing through a gallery attempting to find a match for the face. This is an application could very possibly be a situation that the next generation of CPUs may find themselves in, and while it makes for an interesting benchmark it's not too useful for proving the performance of DDR SDRAM on the Athlon.

The 11% improvement the AMD 760 does hold over the KT133 is most likely due to the increase in FSB frequency as the increased memory bandwidth of the i840 didn't offer any performance improvement over the i815 where the FSB remained the same.

In any case, the main reason for the Athlon's superior performance here is its powerful architecture.

The 188.ammp test, according to SPEC, models "large systems of molecules usually associated with Biology." The test is far from memory bandwidth dependent, rather the base optimizations run beautifully on the Intel platforms with the lower latency SDRAM on the i815E giving it the advantage over the higher bandwidth i840 solution. Only when using aggressive compiler optimizations, again, can the Athlon begin to compete.

The performance improvement caused by the move to DDR SDRAM is most likely negligable, the greatest performance boost seems to come from the FSB or possibly a combination of both.

189.lucas attempts to prove whether a very large number is prime or not. This fairly simple (simple in that it's not doing much outside of that one function) benchmark can very easily take advantage of a particular architecture over another. In this case, the Pentium III takes the gold and it doesn't seem that even more aggressive optimizations can help the Athlon here. There is almost no memory bandwidth dependency in this benchmark.

FMA-3D is essentially a complex 3D collision simulation benchmark. With no graphics card dependencies we can see that the performance of this benchmark is dependent on a powerful FPU and a fast bus interface. The benefit of a high bandwidth memory solution isn't as evident here as the i840 only offered a 3% improvement over the i815.

Again we have a benchmark that doesn't focus on memory or FSB bandwidth, although the Athlon's FSB bandwidth advantage over the Pentium III most definitely plays a part in its performance lead here.

Our final SPEC CFP2000 benchmark uses another weather prediction algorithm. This time around the data array is smaller than what we saw with the 171.swim test, however it is still fairly large. In spite of this, the benchmark is dominated by the Pentium III on the i840 platform. This advantage doesn't come from the memory bandwidth advantage the i840 holds over the competition, since even it only scores 5% above that of an i815. It seems as if the Pentium III is better suited for this test, and the performance lead will only extend with the next version of Intel's compilers.