In order to give yet another view of memory performance, bandwidth and latency, we have added the Everest 2006 Ultimate Edition to our benchmark mix. With many platforms changing to DDR2 or adapting to ever-increasing clock speeds, the question of memory performance has never been more important. The Everest benchmarking suite offers several different memory performance modules, and has quickly become a standard for many hardware evaluations. For this review, we have updated to the very latest Everest Ultimate Edition version 3.0, which is integral for valid Core 2 Extreme/Duo testing. Our benchmark charts center on the Memory Read, Memory Write and Memory Latency tests, which should give us an overall view of the various platforms, and exactly how the Core 2 processors stack up.
The first benchmark is the Memory Read test, and the Core 2 Extreme and Duo processors have made up some ground and now easily surpass the performance of the standard Pentium D 900 series. The Core 2 Extreme X6800, Core 2 Duo E6700 and Core 2 Duo E6600 also do extremely well against the Athlon 64-based competition, and really push the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ to 4600+ models. As we've seen in previous memory tests, the Pentium EE 955 demonstrates one of the inherent advantages of Hyper-Threading, and posts the highest Memory Read score of the bunch.
The Memory Write test changes gears a bit, and now gives the decided advantage to the AMD processors and their integrated memory controllers. The Core 2 architecture does show an improvement compared to the standard Pentium D 960 and 950, but still cannot match either the Pentium EE 955 or DDR-based Athlon 64 FX-60.
Memory latency is one area that the Core 2 Extreme and Duo processors are supposed to address, as the shared 4MB of high-speed L2 cache is intended to lower overall memory latency, and even approach that of an integrated memory controller. The Everest benchmark scores confirm this, and we have the Core 2 Extreme X6800 posting a latency score of under 60ns. AMD processors may still have lower memory latencies, but one look at the high Pentium D 960 and 950 latencies will show you how far Intel has come with the Core 2.
