SiSoft Sandra 64 Bit

We have been using Sandra for a long time, and it is a great tool to rate processor power, it is also one of the few applications which utilises as many cores as you can throw at it, so it is a perfect tool to test the power of the Xeon octo powered system. We are using the 64 bit version with our 64 bit operating system.

Firstly we will take a look at the Multimedia test which takes advantage of multimedia extensions such as SSE, MMX and SSE2, this generates a fractal computation. The "integer x16" test uses integer numbers to simulate floating point math calculations.

"This benchmark generates a picture (640x480) of the well-known Mandelbrot fractal, using 255 iterations for each data pixel, in 32 colours. It is a real-life benchmark rather than a synthetic benchmark, designed to show the improvements MMX/Enhanced, 3DNow!/Enhanced, SSE(2) bring to such an algorithm.

The benchmark is multi-threaded for up to 64 CPUs maximum on SMP systems. This works by interlacing, i.e. each thread computes the next column not being worked on by other threads. Sandra creates as many threads as there are CPUs in the system and assignes [sic] each thread to a different CPU."

Don't have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg

We are off to a good start with Everest and SiSoft Sandra. Intel's X5365 absolutely hammers all competition, and makes the Quad Core extreme scores look positively pedestrian. Right now AMD are in no position to answer however we are awaiting their Barcelona CPU's to address this severe imbalance.