Performance - Dhrystone | Whetstone | Queens solution

Setup your monitor

Before playing games, setting up your monitors contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitor improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly setup.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. Also, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.

Dhrystone CPU test

We make use of a multi-threaded Dhrystone test from SiSoftware Sandra, which basically is a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs. Since the whole program should be really small, it fits into the processor cache. It can be used to measure two aspects, both the processor's speed as well as the optimizing capabilities of the compiler. The resulting number is the number of executions of the program suite per second.

So then, let me first explain how we will be testing and comparing in this article. I wanted to compare the Phenom II processors against a fast dual-core processor, the E8400 (on nFORCE). And since they are so close to each other price wise, we naturally had to include Core i7 920 on X58, priced at 299 USD.

Also we had to include Q6600, the entry-level quad core processor that still sells the best. It offers very good performance for the money. From AMD's side, we included the recently released Phenom 9950 as well.

Also as we promised, throughout the benchmark sessions from A to Z, we will show you overclocked results of the Phenom II X4 940 processor at 3.8 GHz.

The test  - The Dhrystone and Whetstone tests are pure CPU tests that run completely on the CPU itself. Perfect tests to see the general efficiency per core. Though one of the oldest, Dhrystone remains one of the most simple yet extremely accurate and effective ways to show you RAW CPU processing performance making it a very good indicator.

Now as you'll learn in the benchmarks, there's very little chance Phenom II will beat Core i7 920 in a desktop environment. Most of our tests are multi-threaded, and with a hyper threaded 8-cores Intel just has an extensive advantage here.

Make no mistake though as there will be situations where Phenom II will actually win, just not in Dhrystone or Whetstone.

Queen CPU test

This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic "Queens problem" on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example -- with HyperThreading disabled -- the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. However, with enabled HyperThreading the picture is controversial, because due to architectural bottlenecks the Northwood core runs out of internal resources and slows down. Similarly, at the same clock speed AMD K8 class processors will be faster than AMD K7 ones due to the improved branch prediction capabilities of the K8 architecture.

CPU Queen test uses only the basic x86 instructions, it consumes less than 1 MB system memory and it is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core aware and thus is a multithreading CPU Benchmark with MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.

At this stage I decided to remove the E8400 results, and insert the fastest Core 2 Quad processor, the QX9770 Extreme (on Intel X48) as it became apparent, Phenom II X4 is battling that processor.

This is typically a test where the QX9770 always wins thanks to it's large cache and 1600M MHz FSB. Here we see Phenom II crawl ahead of Core i7 920 though. Also compare a little to the Q6600 processor as that pretty much was "THE" quad core processor to get a year ago.