Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Review - Page 4

SiSoft SANDRA XII 2008 Bandwidth Performance

SiSoft SANDRA XII 2008 is a very popular system benchmark, and each revision sticks to its roots and supplies a wide range of individual benchmarks and system utilities. These tests include processor, system, network, and hard drive benchmarks, along with many other performance metrics. The memory bandwidth test is the most popular section of the SiSoft SANDRA benchmark suite, and it highlights the potential performance levels of the CPU-memory subsystem. As the Integer and FPU memory bandwidth scores are quite similar, we are only including the first one in our benchmark testing.

SANDRA XII 2008 includes a range of memory and cache-related benchmarks, and definitely makes a great fit for our high-end processor testing. The roles change in this test, and now the AMD integrated memory controller takes charge, and outperforms the Intel competition. Even so, the 3.0 GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9650 posts the highest score in the Intel camp, well ahead of the Core 2 Extreme QX6850. The 1333 MHz bus certainly plays a part, but the 2x6MB of L2 also comes into play.

The SiSoft SANDRA XII 2008 Cache & Memory benchmark goes well beyond memory performance, and measures the bandwidth of the combined processor cache and memory subsystem. This test can show off the architectural advantages of each processor, as well as the benefits of larger and faster L1/L2 data caches, and help give us an overall view of how the processor and memory match up in high-speed data transfers.

This particular benchmark not only shows quad core ruling over dual, but also has Intel well in front of AMD. The Core 2 Extreme QX9650 once again posted the highest overall score, but this time, the Core 2 Extreme QX6850 sticks very close, staying within a few percentage points of the new 45nm Penryn.

SiSoft SANDRA XII 2008 incorporates a set of multi-core benchmarks that test the inter-core bandwidth, processor affinity and latency of today's top-end CPUs. The first test measures the efficiency of the inter-connect bandwidth, and determines overall bandwidth available between processors. We see another very high score for the Core 2 Extreme QX9650, but amazingly, the Core 2 Extreme QX6850 edges it out.

The second part of the test measures the inter-core latency, where the presence of dual high-speed, quad core processors running on the 1333 MHz bus certainly does wonders for overall inter-core latencies, as evidenced by the insanely low scores of the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 and QX6850.