Nathan Davis flaps his albatross wings over a multithreaded dual-core.
As we’ve mentioned in the past, the clock race is over; Intel and AMD are now focussing on the features that are packed onto the processors. In fact, this dual-core CPU operates at 3.2GHz. The reason for this drop in speed is evident, as it’s logical that two cores will operate signifi cantly hotter than one – listed as pumping out 125W of heat.
As you may have noticed, Intel has dropped the ‘4’ from the naming scheme, now opting for ‘Pentium D’ and ‘Pentium Extreme Edition’ for their dual-core CPUs. The only difference between the two is the Pentium EE features HyperThreading. Aside from that, everything else is identical. Sporting Intel’s EM64T 64-bit architecture, they both consist of two conjoined 90nm Prescotts with 1MB L2 cache each and they both share a surprisingly meagre 800MHz FSB.
With dual core and HT, this does in fact mean the Pentium EE will be capable of executing four concurrent threads, appearing as a quad-CPU-based system to the operating system. This means the Pentium D will appear in Windows as HT processors have in the past – a dual-processor – albeit, theoretically with more grunt. AMD and Intel are adamant on unleashing their dual-core processors in different markets, with AMD focussing on the enterprise market and Intel opening fi re on the desktop market. This is an interesting move, particularly by Intel, as usually the market that most benefits from multi-cored, multi-threaded systems is on server platforms. This is good for us consumers though, as getting these processors into peoples’ machines is what will make the developers more inclined to program multithreaded software.
Testing took place on an engineering 955X board, with two 512MB sticks of DDR2 667MHz and a RADEON X850 XT, thrown against a P4EE 3.73GHz on the same test bed with HT left on. It was beaten in Doom 3, and this was likely due to the P4EE’s 1066MHz FSB and core clock difference, it didn’t seem to benefi t from the four additional threads. As expected, it really does excel in multi-threaded applications such as image processing, scoring 24.14 megapixels per second over the P4EE’s 16.68 in PCMark04.
The 840 was hovering well under 100 percent CPU usage when encoding video, so we loaded up an additional encoding instance to test its multi-tasking capabilities. It managed to encode 72 percent of both of these two videos in the same amount of time it took with one clip (10: 40). Then while playing a game of silky smooth Doom 3 at 1280 x 1024, high quality, we had it encode one instance. It spat it out in 12:09 minutes which is still faster than the P4EE solely encoding video at 100 percent CPU usage.
In order for dual-core processors to strut their stuff at all, the software that runs on them must be multi-threaded, otherwise they perform on par as a similar processor. On the desktop side, the only software that has been boosted with multi-threaded support are multimedia applications such as 3D renderers, video encoders and image editing suites. Games are among the rest of the pack that are singlethreaded and really won’t see a boost until they are programmed to do otherwise.
It may be best to wait for the technology to be properly realised, but if you’re already a heavy multi-tasker, into multimedia, or just love having the latest, the 840 just might be tantalising enough.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012