ScienceMark 2.0. HEXUS Crypto, MP3 encoding
ScienceMark 2.0 - Memory Access Latency
ScienceMark 2.0 lets you measure access latency to system memory at a number of data sizes. We choose a size of 4MiB to overflow the CPU's cache memory store and force a trip out to main memory.
The Athlon X2 features a revised memory controller, compared to the CG-core FX-53 and FX-55 on test, that's designed to be even better when accessing main memory. Despite that, it's ever so slightly slower in our access latency test than those older processors.
ScienceMark 2.0 - Memory Bandwidth
Memory bandwidth is a few hundred MiB/sec down on the FX processors with everything trailing the DDR2-710-powered Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. While the X2 sports a revised memory controller, it consistently has a bit less bandwidth to play with than the single-core FX processors.
ScienceMark 2.0 - Primordia
Primordia is a multi-threaded benchmark that stresses floating point performance.
Being able to run a pair of computation threads shows an immediate advantage over the other processors the X2 is compared to. It's nearly 20% faster than the FX-53, clocked at the same frequency.
HEXUS Crypto
HEXUS Crypto is a resolutely single-threaded application that stresses the floating point unit of a processor.
The new core revision of the X2 allows it to pull ahead of the FX-53 by nearly 2%. It trails the faster FX-55 but bests all others.
MP3 Encoding
Using LAME 3.96 to encode a batch of .wav files into MP3 format, this single-threaded test is a decent measure of core FPU performance on a processor.
The X2 is a couple of seconds faster than the FX-53. The X2 4800+ and the FX-53 share core frequency and L2 cache size (per core, obviously), so you can see the newer core revision used to build the X2 has a tiny bit more basic speed, due mainly to a revised memory controller.
