Synthetic and Memory Tests
The latest edition of SiSoft Sandra continues on the tradition of testing the purely synthetic power of the processors to see how much performance software developers might be able to pull out of them.
Our first set of tests look at our usual synthetic benchmark, SiSoft Sandra. The initial outlook for the Phenom processors isn’t good if you expected these CPUs to be challenging the performance crown of Intel’s Core 2 parts. The new quad-core Phenoms out pace both the dual-core Athlons and Core 2 chips though and the floating point performance is close to that of the Q9450 processor.
The Intel quad-core parts again have a very large margin over AMD Phenom and are coming up just a bit faster than the string of dual-core parts tested.
These results were pretty surprising to me as the one area we could always count on for AMD to be successful was in the raw memory performance tests. Here the new QX9770 with the 1600 MHz FSB (and 1600 MHz DDR3 memory) is nearly on par with the top AMD X2 part while the Phenom 9600 and 9900 parts are coming in ahead of only the aging Core 2 Extreme X6800.
