Intel's Pentium 4 with 533MHz Bus and The i850E Chipset


Intel's Pentium 4 with 533MHz Bus and The i850E Chipset - Page 4

 

Intel's Pentium 4 with 533MHz Bus and The i850E Chipset
2.4 and 2.53GHz performance with a 533MHz Front Side Bus

By, Dave Altavilla
May 6, 2002

 
MadOnion's new PCMark 2002 benchmarking suite, certainly holds promise as an easy to use, "quick and dirty" sanity check on various subsystem performance characteristics.  In the following tests, we chose to run their "CPU" and "Memory" performance modules, which incorporate the following tests:

CPU Test:

  • JPEG decompression
  • Zlib compression & decompression
  • Text search
  • MP3 Audio Conversion
  • 3D Vector Calculation

Memory Test:
The Memory tests measure the performance of the memory subsystem. Read, write, read-modify-write, and random access operations are tested on the system memory, L2 and L1 cache. These tests are implemented in the same manner as memory accesses in normal applications, and are not optimized to achieve maximum throughput. However, since no other tasks are run while performing the memory transfers, quite high throughput numbers can be expected.

Technical details:
Raw read, write, and read-modify-write operations are performed starting from a 3072 kilobytes array decreasing insize to 1536 kB, 384 KB, 48 KB and finally 6 KB. Each size of block is tested two second and the amount of accessed data is given as result. In the STL container test a list of 116 byte elements is constructed and sorted by an integer pseudo-random key. The list is then iterated through as many times as possible for 2 seconds and the total size of the accessed elements is given as result. There are 6 runs of this test, with 24576 items in the largest run corresponding to a total data amount of 1536 kB, decreasing in size to 12288 items (768 kB), 6144 items (384 kB), 1536 items (96 kB), 768 items (48 kB) and 96 items in the smallest run corresponding to 6 kB of total data.

MadOnion PCMark 2002 Head to Head Performance Progression
Something new from the makers of 3DMark


"i850E, PC1066 and SiS645dx" scores are representative of a 533MHz system bus

These test results scale almost exactly as one would expect, with the 2.53GHz Pentium 4 based systems taking the lead by comfortable margins.  Again, the PC1066 driven systems with 533MHz system busses, have the best of both worlds, high FSB speeds and 1/3 more system memory bandwidth and the scores show this advantage.  Additionally, the SiS645dx chipset shows it is more than capable to compete with the i850E in this test.

However, let's take a look at overall system memory bandwidth and see if low latency DDR333 can keep pace with RDRAM in the Memory Test.


"i850E, PC1066 and SiS645dx" scores are representative of a 533MHz system bus

We're not sure what happened to the Athlon XP 2100+ here but it was totally man handled by both the RDRAM i850 and i850E systems, as well as the DDR333 based SiS645dx board.  Clearly, this test takes into account not just DRAM bandwidth but also front side bus bandwidth.  In this regard, the Pentium 4 architecture has a significant advantage over the Athlon, in this test.  Additionally, it's obvious to note that PC1066 RDRAM systems made the strongest showing, with the 2.4GHz PC1066 setup almost overtaking the 2.53GHz i850E.

 

Let's step back out of the synthetic benchmarks however and step back into the "real world", with some Professional 3D Rendering and Multimedia Encoding work.

 

Flask MPEG w/ DIVX and Lightwave 7


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