Tyan's Tiger MP: Affordable Multiprocessing

Multithreaded Workstation Application Performance

Although a part of the age old High-End Winstone 99 benchmark suite, Ziff Davis Media's Dual Processor Inspection Tests are still very useful for measuring the performance of 2P systems.

You must keep in mind however that because of the relative age of the benchmarks, the datasets being operated on are not nearly as large as today's datasets.  This gives the smaller L2 cache of the Duron a bit of a break, but you shouldn't ignore the obvious.

Here we don't see a significant benefit from going to a 2P setup in Microstation.  This is actually similar to what we've seen in other MCAD/CAD applications such as Pro/ENGINEER.  The x86 version of Pro/ENGINEER isn't even multithreaded.

Under Photoshop we see a reasonable performance increase by going to two processors.

Compiling two projects at once is what yields such very impressive results in this Visual C++ test.  Clock speed dominates over cache size in this case as the working data sets are able to fit almost entirely within the L2 cache of the Duron.