CPU Reviews & Articles

SiSoft SANDRA 2001

SiSoft SANDRA is an interesting suite of individual benchmarks and system utilities. These are artificial tests that can give a different view of processor and subsystem performance, far away from system tests. The benchmarks we are concerned with are the CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multi-Media, and Memory Bandwidth tests.

The SiSoft SANDRA CPU Arithmetic tests outline the potential performance of the ALU (integer) and FPU (floating-point) portions of the CPU. In this area, we see a strange pattern start to emerge, as the Athlon XP 2000+ takes the ALU crown, while falling back quite a bit in FPU testing. In these tests, the platform mattered little and this helps isolate the theoretical performance of the processors.

The CPU Multi-Media benchmarks are similar to the Arithmetic tests, except that the MMX and SSE/SSE2 capabilities of the processor are highlighted. Even after taking this into consideration, the Athlon XP 2000+ continues to lead on ALU/MMX benchmarking, while losing out to the Pentium 4 in FPU/SSE scores. One note of interest is how much ground the Athlon XP 2000+ makes up on the Pentium 4 once we add SSE to the mix. The Pentium 4-2.2 GHz has shrunk to almost nothing, which is a big change from the Arithmetic scores.

One of the most popular sections of the SiSoft SANDRA suite is the memory bandwidth tests. Naturally, the dual-channel Pentium 4-2.2/i850 leads the pack by a wide margin, but even taking a pure DDR vs. DDR view shows the Athlon XP 2000+ falling behind the i845D. No amount of SSE enhancements is going to save it here, and the Pentium 4 Northwood's large cache seems to make a real difference with this benchmark. Check out the differential between the Pentium 4-2.0A and the standard Pentium 4-2.0 for further confirmation.