Synthetic Benchmarks

We continue our benchmark analysis by going through the different options provided by SiSoftware Sandra. These are more synthetic results to show the actual performance of the first quad core from Intel. We will use once again the Core 2 Duo E6300 which will again be overclocked to 2.66GHz, by increasing the bus speed to 380MHz. The default core clock of the E6300 is only 1.86GHz with a bus speed of 266MHz. The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 however runs standard at 2.66GHz with the bus speed at 266MHz, so the default settings. Both processors will go through the same Arithmetic and Multimedia benchmark.

SiSoftware Sandra 2007

SiSoftware Sandra (the System Analyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information and diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what's really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. We will be using Sandra to check the performance of the first quad core CPU from Intel, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700.

Arithmetic Benchmark

The first program that we load is the Arithmetic benchmark which will show how the CPU's will handle arithmetic and floating point instructions and this in comparison to other typical processors. This means both the Arithmetic Logic Unit and the Floating Point Unit of the processor will put to work at full load to find their actual processing capacity. So we ran this benchmark on both Intel CPU's and recorded their performance. This will provide us a very nice base to compare and show the difference between quad and dual core processors.

Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better. - C2E QX6700 at 2.66GHz

Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better. - C2D E6300 at 2.66GHz

Quite a performance giant, doubling almost the results delivered by the Core 2 Extreme X6800 which is clocked at 2.93GHz. And when looking at the Core 2 Duo E6700 which is running at 2.66GHz just like the QX6700 we can see that is really doubling the performance in both dhrystone and whetstone results. The same counts when we look at our overclocked E6300, clocked at 2.66GHz. This should sound logic as the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 has also the double amount of cores to get the job done. So not really a surprise, but it does proof that Intel truly managed to fully integrate two dual core CPU's to build their first quad core processor delivering excellent performance.

Multimedia Benchmark

Of course the current processors are a bit more complicated and are enhanced for multimedia purposes. This came initially as an extension defined and introduced by Intel in form of the MMX instruction set. But since then time has passed and brought a lot more extension to the initial multimedia update. To get a view on what this brings as extra we ran the Multimedia benchmark which will show how the CPU's handle multimedia instructions and data in comparison to other typical processors. So this doesn't mean only the MMX, but all the Streaming SIMD Extensions also called SSE, SSE2,...

Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better. - C2E QX6700 at 2.66GHz

Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better. - C2D E6300 at 2.66GHz

A similar image we get when looking at the multimedia results reported by Sandra. Again the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is doubling the performance of the Core 2 Duo E6700, with both processors running at 2.66GHz. To compare again with our own E6300 we had to run it at a similar clock rate, so we overclocked it to reach 2.66GHz. No read difference either, the QX6700 just done it again by doubling the results of our overclocked Core 2 Duo processor. And although this was an easy way for Intel to get their first quad core processor on the market, it does prove that their dual core design stands out in the crowd. By just applying two Core 2 Duo CPU's on one single chip Intel has been able to double the raw power and multimedia performance with their quad core processor.