Memory analysis and HEXUS.PiFast
The latest version of SiSoft SANDRA's memory bandwidth benchmark provides support for tri-core processors and benchmarks memory bandwidth in AMD's preferred way. That is, it's now heavily multithreaded, rather than lightly multi-threaded as it was in previous versions.
With Intel continuing to use an FSB as opposed to an onboard memory controller, its chips don't perform well in this particular test. AMD's Phenom X3 8750 on the other hand does, and drops in just behind the Phenom X4s as expected.
It should be noted that SiSoft SANDRA's new testing mechanism isn't entirely reflective of how the bulk of consumer applications access memory, we feel.
Memory latency is continuing to prove problematic for AMD's Phenom series, in both X3 and X4 varients. Our in-depth look at AMD's new and improved pre-fetching design gave hope that Phenom X4s would excel in this area, unfortunately, they, along with the Phenom X3, fall significantly behind Intel's Core 2 Quad Q6600 and Core 2 Duo E8200. This is, however, a synthetic benchmark and not truly representative of real-world performance.
When it comes to our single-threaded HEXUS.PiFast test, AMD's tri-core Phenom X3 manages to best its X4 counterparts but falls far short of both Intel processors. It takes an Athlon 64 clocked at 3.2GHz to match Intel's 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad.
The 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 races ahead of the pack.
