I have moved my blog to a new address. Please update your bookmarks to:
http://jlp.holodeck1.com/blog/

2005-02-25

 

My Windows XP x64 Edition RC2 Benchmark

AMD64 LogoI few days ago I have decided to do my own little benchmark of recently released 64-bit Windows XP Professional x64 Edition RC2 (build 1433, free download). I compared it to 32-bit Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2 installed. My system has the following configuration:

Before benchmarking in 32-bit and 64-bit mode I have installed Windows XP Professional on fresh and installed all the latest official drivers that were available at that time. Every benchmark was run three times and then I calculated the average values which are listed in the tables below.

My first benchmark was in Sisoftware Sandra Lite. The version I used was 2005.2.10.50. I used 32-bit Sandra on 32-bit Windows and 64-bit Sandra on 64-bit Windows. Here are the results (higher is better):
Benchmark32 on 3264 on 64Factor
CPU Arithmetic Dhrystone ALU9104 MIPS9784 MIPS1,07
CPU Arithmetic Whetstone FPU3122 MFLOPS3581 MFLOPS1,15
CPU Arithmetic Whetstone iSSE24046 MFLOPS4165 MFLOPS1,03
CPU Multimedia Integer aEMMX/aSSE (*)18875 it/s (*)14831 it/s (*)0,79 (*)
CPU Multimedia Float x4 iSSE220269 it/s22852 it/s1,13
Memory Bandwidth Int Buff'd iSSE22898 MB/s2941 MB/s1,01
Memory Bandwidth Float Buff'd iSSE22900 MB/s2938 MB/s1,01
Cache & Memory Combined Index4630 MB/s4867 MB/s1,05
Cache & Memory Speed Factor8,910,81,21

Then I tried some encoding of music into Ogg Vorbis (lossy) and FLAC (lossless) formats. Ogg Vorbis was version 1.1.0 and FLAC was 1.1.2. Since I couldn't find any 64-bit optimized binaries I used 32-bit ones in both Windows editions. Here are the results (lower is better):
Benchmark32 on 3232 on 64Factor
Ogg Vorbis Notorious B.I.G.21,9 s21,0 s1,04
Ogg Vorbis Bach44,5 s41,8 s1,06
Ogg Vorbis Tschaikowsky137,9 s130,0 s1,06
FLAC Notorious B.I.G.29,0 s27,2 s1,07
FLAC Bach58,3 s54,3 s1,07
FLAC Tschaikowsky183,4 s170,8 s1,07

I also started the benchmark that is included in WinRAR 3.42 (higher is better):
Benchmark32 on 3232 on 64Factor
WinRAR483 KB/s500 KB/s1,04

I also checked the CPU time for 5 results for Einstein@Home project computed in each edition of Windows (lower is better):
Benchmark32 on 3232 on 64Factor
Einstein@Home23345 s22517 s1,04

What can I say. Quite good for a beta version of Windows without optimized drivers. But I guess these don't play such a big role in these tests. It is a bigger problem with games and until we get good 64-bit drivers it is just not worth to upgrade to 64-bit Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Games will run quite a bit slower until then. On the other hand it looks like other applications mostly just get additional performance on 64-bit CPU like AMD Athlon 64 and using 64-bit OS. Even if the apps are only 32-bit. I can't wait for final release of Windows XP x64 Edition sometime in April and to see more 64-bit apps/drivers optimized for AMD64. Then Windows platform will catch the great support for AMD64 we now get with Linux distributions like Gentoo Linux.

UPDATE: This is what SiSoftware says about the unusually low CPU Multimedia Integer benchmark:

As you know (E)MMX mode is not supported in Windows x64 thus the test in 64-bit mode uses SSE2. If you look at the bar in 64-bit mode (or results) you'll see x16 SSE2 not x4 EMMX/SSE.

This is a known issue with the K8 (Athlon/Opteron) which is why we use EMMX and not SSE2 in 32-bit mode. But we cannot use this in 64-bit mode.

If you disable "optimisation over-ride" you'll see that the SSE2 score in 32-bit is worse than EMMX and less than in 64-bit. Thus there is nothing wrong, the SSE2 code is faster in 64-bit than 32-bit but not faster than EMMX.

I will have to check out if this is true later. But judging from other results I am sure this one is also faster in 64-bit mode.


Comments:
Very nice benchmark. Too bad it is not longer :) I can't wait for 64-bit Windows for my Athlon 64. It is great to have some free speedup.
 
I get similar results. Even more faster speed in 64-bit Windows. I will get Windows XP for AMD64 as soon as it becomes available here. It is just great.
 
Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?