ServerWorks HEsl: DDR bandwidth without DDR SDRAM

Photoshop 4 MP & Visual C++ MP

Photoshop is a much different situation than Microstation in that dual processors not only help out performance-wise, but they are actually very appreciated. Again we see that the performance range is only about 3% in this benchmark as well, mainly because of the fact that we're dealing with fairly similarly configured systems.

The only platform with less than 2GB/s of peak available memory bandwidth is the Apollo Pro 133A and it performing slightly below the rest of the systems but not by much at all as we just mentioned.

This particular test sequence definitely favors dual processor CPUs as a 1.2GHz AMD Athlon with DDR SDRAM is about 30% slower than these lowly dual 733s. In terms of favoring one platform over another however, this test shows that there's very little difference between the four.

The final member of the Dual Processor Inspection Test Suite is Visual C++. The coders out there know exactly how time consuming compiling large projects can be especially when you're doing multiple things at once. This is another situation in which having dual processors really helps, simply because of the additional computational power. However it is clear that having some additional memory bandwidth does not hurt either.

For starters let's take note of the fact that the performance range under the Visual C++ 5 test is just over 9%. Taking into account that all of these systems have the same CPUs, with the same hard drive and the same amount of memory, this illustrates that close to a 10% performance gain can be had simply by increasing the amount of available memory bandwidth.

A very likely possibility being that in a situation like this, where multiple processors provide a considerable performance improvement (dual 733s in this test are faster than a single 1.2GHz Athlon), is the fact that the processors are competing heavily for what limited memory bandwidth they have to share and the more they have the more productive each individual CPU can be.

This would explain why the chipsets perform the way they do, except for the HEsl which rises to the top presumably because of a combination of its high bandwidth memory subsystem and other more efficient parts of the chipset's design; possible reasons for this include the intelligent caching the North Bridge does, leaving more useable bandwidth for the CPUs and simple performance tweaks that ServerWorks has picked up on over the years while optimizing for workstation/server class systems.