8 - Performance: Memory, FPU and CPU transcoding

Memory test

Everest has an excellent tool to measure memory bandwidth, surprisingly the GA-X48-DQ6 is performing pretty much on par. We expected a little more with DDR3 @ 1333 MHz though.

The memory is showing a slight lead though in write performance, but still ... the integrated memory controller on the AMD processors, you have to respect that.

Mandel FPU test

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 variants 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.

FPU Mandel test again is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core aware. Here's where the Intel Quad core processors always kick in. The Intel X48 based ECS board is showing leading performance here, even over the Gigabtye counterpart. Though that mainboard is based on DDR2 memory.

Multi-threaded Video Transcoding VC-1 to WMV9

We ran is multiple times, reset the system, checked parameters & settings yet the X48 mainboards are just fast with transcoding. It can't beat the Phenom though.