Intel Core Duo: AOpen i975Xa-YDG to the Rescue
by Gary Key on May 4, 2006 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
File Compression Performance
In order to save space on our hard drives and ensure we had another CPU crunching utility, we will be reporting our file compression results with two different versions of WinRAR. Our first file compression test utilizes WinRAR 3.51 to compress our Sum of All Fears Chapter 9 test file and our INXS Greatest Hits wma extraction tracks. All default settings in WinRAR are utilized along with our hard drive being defragmented before each test.
The Intel platform basically zips away from the AMD platform in our tests. File compression is a very CPU intensive application and also stresses the memory subsystem heavily. The added cache of Core Duo certainly helps in this particular test. The other interesting result is that our performance results scaled almost 1:1 with the increase in CPU speed, again indicative of a benchmark that makes good use of CPU cache. As an example, our Intel system has a 53% increase in CPU speed while the file compression numbers improved 52% in the Sum of All Fears benchmark and 59% in our INXS Greatest Hits compression test.
Our second series of file compression tests utilizes WinRAR 3.60b2 to compress the same files as before. All default settings are once again utilized in WinRAR along with our hard drive being defragmented before each test. This particular version of WinRAR fully supports multi-threading operations and should be of particular interest for those users with dual core or multi-processor systems.
The program update to WinRAR produces stunning results as we see drops of up to 66% in our Sum of All Fears results and 48% in the INXS Greatest Hits benchmark due to the multi-threading support. We also see the gap close up to 11% between the two platforms indicating our AMD Opteron has improved performance under this application. Basically, the multi-threading support in this version of WinRAR has negated the need for an additional 1GHz of CPU speed.
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Myrandex - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Believe it or not, people can run 64bit apps for other reaons from 4GB memory...such as increased performance? I knwo not many apps right now show increased perofrmance with 64bit mode, but some do and I believe this will go up when more developers start programing for it with more intensity and all that.Jason
peternelson - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
For me this is the showstopper, and the reason I much prefer Turion at present.Core Solo/ Core Duo are 32 bit only. That makes them quite rarely disadvantaged - even the new Celerons can do 64 bit EM64T.
This board would be of much more interest if the review said "THIS BOARD IS MEROM-READY". As it doesn't, I assume it isn't. The review here might have highlighted this important issue which will be crucial deciding factor for some potential purchasers, especially considering the price.
I see Conroe and Merom systems quickly filling the market need this board is targetted at.
Gary Key - Friday, May 5, 2006 - link
Only disadvantaged for those utilizing 64-bit applications and operation systems, but for 95% of the marketplace they are fine. Not that I do not think it is an issue, but one that is way overblown in today's marketplace.
Probably in a couple of years it will be completely different but for now, 32-bit applications are still king of the hill (market share wise). This upsets me as I have to believe the entire migration path should have been completed by next year but the foot dragging between Microsoft and Intel negated AMD's advantage in this area for far too long. With that said, Merom takes care of the Yonah 64-bit issue in the mobile sector for Intel in a couple of months. It will be very interesting to see how it compares to Turion 64 X2, it will be good for all of us to have choices in the mobile sector.
We cannot quote on whether this board is Merom approved or not until qualification testing is complete. Will a Merom T7400 work in this board with the bios 1.3b, yes it will, and the initial results show a great deal of improvement over Yonah in certain benchmarks. Will Merom be fully supported by Intel and AOpen on this board, we do not know yet. AOpen is waiting a production spin of Merom before trying to the qualify it on this board and even then Intel might force everyone to Crestline for official support. We are still trying to figure out if Merom is going to work with 945GM as stated a couple of months ago. The entire situation is so up in the air right now that any statement has the potential to be wrong so being quiet is the best possible option. :)
johnsonx - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
from the spring idf article on AT:Now that may not be a 100% promise, but until Merom is actually released, there's no way to be 100% certain any given board will work with it.
Viditor - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
You mean 4GB or greater...at 4GB, a 32bit processor will be using PAE already.
And yes, I find that 4GB is a great help on a number of my apps...
Questar - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Mobile/SFF apps?Name them.
Viditor - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Photoshop CS2, Premiere Pro, and Mental Ray...
Questar - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
I'm a heavy Premiere user, and I can tell you it's a 32 bit app.Chadder007 - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
You can still run it under a 64 bit OS and have access to the 4gb or greater amount of ram.defter - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
No you can't. If you have an 32bit software then it can only address 4GB of memory.