Tyan's Tiger MP: Affordable Multiprocessing

Business & Content Creation Performance

We've included a SYSMark 2001 run to show the benefits of going to a 2P system for the user that doesn't necessarily run many multithreaded applications but merely uses OS level multitasking.  Running multiple applications at once is quite common and can be quite taxing, this is exactly what SYSMark 2001 shows us.

Here we see a hefty boost from going to two processors.  Content Creation applications can be very CPU intensive and performing a render function in a single application while working in another can bring a system to its knees. 

It's also interesting to note the 42% performance advantage the 2P Athlon MP 1.0GHz setup has over the 2P Duron 1GHz.  Part of this performance increase is due to the increase in FSB frequency, but a good portion of it is due to the 4x increase in L2 cache per processor. 

The performance improvement from going to a 2P system is much less when dealing with multitasking under office applications.  Here we only see a 13% improvement for the Duron. 

Again there's a 20% boost when going from the Duron 1GHz based on the Morgan core, to the very similar Athlon MP 1GHz based on the Palomino core. 

The overall performance increase is definitely impressive, but not outstanding.  It should be noted that in spite of the 2P Athlon MP's dominance in this test, a single 1.53GHz Athlon will be able to outperform it.  This should make the choice very clear that for users that aren't running specifically multithreaded applications or applications that would easily each take up over 75% of the CPU time of a single CPU; as cool as a 2P system may be, it's not for you.

Now onto the workstation benchmarks…