AMD Phenom 9900 Performance Preview - Page 5

Everest Ultimate Edition 4.2 Performance

In order to give yet another view of memory performance, bandwidth and latency, we have incorporated Everest Ultimate Edition 4.2 into our benchmark mix. With many platforms upgrading the CPU bus clock and DDR2/DDR3 memory 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 use very latest Everest Ultimate Edition version 4.2, which is essential for valid dual and quad core platform testing. Our benchmark testing centers 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 Phenom 9900 stacks up.

The Memory Read test is the first Everest benchmark, and while the Phenom 9900 does outperform its Intel Core 2-based competition, the overall results still lag behind the Athlon 64 X2. This is another potential issue with the benchmark design, although the Phenom does show much higher performance than in the pre-SP1 SANDRA testing.

Speaking of low results, the Memory Write test drops us right back to square one, and highlights the Phenom in a very unflattering manner. Until we know exactly what is going on with these benchmarks, and whether the fault lies with the software or the Phenom, all we can do is present them as is - while noting that SANDRA memory bandwidth increased dramatically with the new version.

It's much the same story with the memory latency rating, as the Phenom 9900 and co. easily drop below the Core 2 Quad and Extreme models, but still can't catch the Athlon 64 X2 processors.