The Mandel FPU benchmark measures double precision (also known as 64-bit) floating-point performance through the computation of several frames of the popular "Mandelbrot" fractal. The code behind this benchmark method is written in Assembly, and it is extremely optimized for every popular AMD and Intel processor core variant by utilizing the appropriate x86 or SSE2 instruction set extension.

Now if you come from the Commodore 64 / Amiga era like me, you can probably remember rendering Mandelbrot graphics, and it took a full day to complete an image. Amazing where we are right now as the same set of calculations can be done in seconds & even real-time.

The FPU Mandel test again is HyperThreaded, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core aware.

Again, please observe the difference between the QX9770 and i7 965 processors.

CPU data decompression

A data decompression test much like un-zipping something, measured in MB/sec. Here also the picture is not any different. In combo with HyperThreading enabled the Core i7 destroys anything in its path. You can see the faster memory bandwidth kick in pretty well.