CPU Reviews & Articles

SiSoft Sandra 2001

SiSoft Sandra Professional is a suite of benchmarks and diagnostic tools that cover most aspects of system performance and troubleshooting. The three tests we are concentrating on are the CPU, CPU Multi-Media, and Memory benchmarks, all of which isolate certain areas or features of the CPU and sub-system. For reference, the ALU portion relates to Integer performance, while the FPU isolates the Floating-Point Unit of the processor. The CPU Multi-Media test will be most interesting, since it allows us to test both SSE and 3DNow! capabilities of the Duron 1.2 GHz to see how each matches up.

In the SiSoft CPU ALU and FPU benchmarks, the Duron 1.2 GHz is naturally well in the lead compared to the lower-speed Duron models. It also makes a great showing against the Athlon 1.2 GHz, either matching or surpassing it in the CPU tests. The FPU test in particular isolates the CPU portion of the system and results likely point to benefits of using the improved Duron core such as its Data Prefetch and SSE features.

In the CPU Multi-Media Benchmark testing, we have tried to illustrate any potential performance benefits of the enhanced Duron core. For each of the SSE-enabled Duron processors there are two separate results, one for SSE and the other for 3DNow!. If you look closely at the Duron vs. Athlon results you will see that while the 3DNow! results are virtually the same at 1.2 GHz, once the SSE enhancements come into play the FPU mark of the Duron starts to pull away.

Our last SiSoft SANDRA test determines the potential memory bandwidth of each CPU/subsystem combination. In both ALU and FPU memory testing, we start to see some of the potential performance gains of the newer Duron design. These tests make use of SSE and 3DNow! enhancements and point to a definite memory performance advantage for the Duron 1.2 GHz. The enhanced Data Prefetch feature at also hard at work predicting data requirements to speed up overall memory processing.