JLP's Blog

I 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:

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ socket 754
• Motherboard: MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R (BIOS 2.0)
• Memory: 1 GiB Corsair TwinX-1024 3200LL
• Graphics: Leadtek WinFast A400 TDH (nVidia GeForce 6800)
• Hard disk: Hitachi 7K250 160 GiB with 8 MiB cache PATA
• Sound: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

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):

Benchmark	32 on 32	64 on 64	Factor
CPU Arithmetic Dhrystone ALU	9104 MIPS	9784 MIPS	1,07
CPU Arithmetic Whetstone FPU	3122 MFLOPS	3581 MFLOPS	1,15
CPU Arithmetic Whetstone iSSE2	4046 MFLOPS	4165 MFLOPS	1,03
CPU Multimedia Integer aEMMX/aSSE (*)	18875 it/s (*)	14831 it/s (*)	0,79 (*)
CPU Multimedia Float x4 iSSE2	20269 it/s	22852 it/s	1,13
Memory Bandwidth Int Buff'd iSSE2	2898 MB/s	2941 MB/s	1,01
Memory Bandwidth Float Buff'd iSSE2	2900 MB/s	2938 MB/s	1,01
Cache & Memory Combined Index	4630 MB/s	4867 MB/s	1,05
Cache & Memory Speed Factor	8,9	10,8	1,21

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):

Benchmark	32 on 32	32 on 64	Factor
Ogg Vorbis Notorious B.I.G.	21,9 s	21,0 s	1,04
Ogg Vorbis Bach	44,5 s	41,8 s	1,06
Ogg Vorbis Tschaikowsky	137,9 s	130,0 s	1,06
FLAC Notorious B.I.G.	29,0 s	27,2 s	1,07
FLAC Bach	58,3 s	54,3 s	1,07
FLAC Tschaikowsky	183,4 s	170,8 s	1,07

I also started the benchmark that is included in WinRAR 3.42 (higher is better):

Benchmark	32 on 32	32 on 64	Factor
WinRAR	483 KB/s	500 KB/s	1,04

I also checked the CPU time for 5 results for Einstein@Home project computed in each edition of Windows (lower is better):

Benchmark	32 on 32	32 on 64	Factor
Einstein@Home	23345 s	22517 s	1,04

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.

# posted by Jure "JLP" Repinc @ 2/25/2005 07:25:00 PM