Benchmarks I
We fully expect the 3.2GHz Pentium, when run on a Canterwood motherboard, to be faster than anything else currently available (barring the odd, freaky Springdale board).Pifast is usually a reasonable indicator of just how much performance progression a piece of hardware has made. 3.2GHz of clock speed allied to a fast, dual-channel motherboard should do well in this benchmark that calculates the constant Pi to a pre-selected 10m places. We're using version 4.1. If you want to try it yourself head here for the download link and current standings.
We have a new performance champion here. There's little to say other than it's just blindingly fast.
Will it reign supreme when it comes to converting good, ol' WAV files to 192kb/s MP3s ?.
The test is encoding U2's Pop album (610MB of WAVs) into decent quality MP3s. It was all over in a scant 2 minutes and 46 seconds. Needless to say that this is the fastest, stock time on record.
SETI next. A common-ish 0.417WU is used to benchmark the systems. Time is in hours, minutes, and seconds.
We'd have hoped for a little more than just over 6 minutes gain when switching from a 3.0 to a 3.2GHz CPU. The problem is that memory bandwidth stays the same in both cases, we simply have a faster clock speed accompanied by the same memory performance; that's why we don't see perfectly linear increases in the SETI benchmark.
