Performance - Dhrystone | Whetstone

DhryStone CPU test

We make use of a multi-threaded Dhrystone test from SiSoftware Sandra, which is basically 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.

The first stop is the SANDRA DhryStone and Whetstone tests. These two tests are pure unadulterated 100% CPU tests that run completely within the CPU + cache memory itself. A perfect test to observe the general efficiency per core.

Though one of the oldest, Dhrystone remains a simple yet accurate and effective way to show you RAW CPU processing performance making it a very good indicator. The rest of the processors are in the chart just for scaling.

So then, let me first explain how and what we will be testing and comparing in this article. Due to the nature of changes in our benchmark software we'll try to add many processors per benchmark title for you to compare to.

Light blue: today's tested motherboard with the Core i7 3960X (Sandy Bridge-E) processor at its respective default clock frequencies and system set at BIOS defaults. The highest result is the same setup yet with the processor overclocked at 4.9 GHz.

You'll notice that in all benchmarks the BB XPower II performance better in the CPU tests opposed to the reference setup. MSI is being a little sneaky, and we have observed this before with board from Gigabyte and ASUS. Typically when you stress a Core i7 3960 on all cores the turbo mode will set two cores at 3700 MHz, two at 3800, two 3900 and once all cores stressed it will bin down all cores to 3600 MHz.

MSI has changed the Turbo bin variable for you at default to 3900 MHz on all cores when the processors Turbo's kick in. So If all cores are in use they all run at 3900 MHz, hence the baseline performance offset. This also explains the slightly higher power consumption under processor load.

Whetstone FPU

The Whetstone benchmark is a synthetic benchmark for evaluating the performance of computers. It was initially written in Algol 60, back in 1972. The Whetstone benchmark originally measured computing power in units of kilo-Whetstone Instructions Per Second (kWIPS). This was later changed to Millions of Whetstone Instructions Per Second (MWIPS).

The Whetstone benchmark primarily measures the floating-point (FPU) arithmetic performance. A similar benchmark for integer and string operations is thus Dhrystone.