Business Application Performance

When we use the term "business applications" we normally think about computer users sitting in cubicles using their PCs as a part of their daily jobs - checking email, editing documents, flipping through presentations and such. It turns out that a good number of users outside the workplace use their PCs in a "business" oriented fashion, basically using their systems for email, web browsing and document editing.

The Business Winstone 2002 benchmark suite has been with us for quite some time and stresses multitasking environments that incorporate actions such as checking email, browsing the web, editing Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

The nature of these tasks predominantly stresses the integer execution units of modern day microprocessors as well as their load/store units for memory accesses. Given that we're dealing with mostly integer code, a good deal of it happens to be filled with conditional branches (read: if action A then do action B). As we've seen in previous investigations, architectures with shorter pipelines tend to do much better with branch-happy code. So let's look at the results:

Here the performance advantage is clearly AMD; the shorter pipeline of the Athlon 64 combined with the large L2 cache and the on-die memory controller make the Athlon 64 a very strong performer under business applications.

Memory Latency & Bandwidth Performance Content Creation Performance
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  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    Anand runs the Content Creation benchmark without the bugfix patch?!?! WTF? Like that's fair... Without the patch, it doesn't use SSE properly with the Athlons...

    And the FX 51 benches are completely bogus, because he used an nForce3-based motherboard.

    They've got issues, and the Via boards outperform
    them significantly. Hello? Anand?

    http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2003q3/athlon64...

    "Notice here the contrast between the Athlon 64 FX with the K8T800 and with the nForce3 Pro. With the K8T800, the Athlon 64 FX is arguably the fastest system overall in the viewperf suite. The nForce3 Pro, however, seems to limit performance quite a bit."
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    #9 Which planet are you on?
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    Great news for the Linux users:-) I'm seeing a lot of Windows users switching to Linux and using transcode or cinelerra:-)
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    Good thing you are not biased at atll, #4
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    Eat it #6 amd fan boy
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    yes, you're right #4, they're biased. just like all the other tech sites praising the new amd chip. they're obviously all wrong.... go away
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    Still can't decide. Leaning Intel... I've had better experience with Intel.. but next year When XP64 shipes......
    Guess I will stick with my trusty 386..
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    BIASED BIASED BIASED BIASED BIASED

    The P4EE whoops new AMDs chip and you say is "The Pentium 4 EE manages to regain some lost ground for Intel, but not enough". YOU ARE CRAZY!!!!!! The Prescott will DEMOLISH AMD once and for all. Btw, get some more benchmarks. Q3 and UT2003 are OLD GAMES using DX8. Run Battlefield and other memory/cpu entensive games.

    AMD fanboys can't cry about their chip is slower but cheaper either.

    Worst biased site ever. Just because they kissed your butt and showed you the cpu's a year in advance you shove your nose up AMDs socket.

    BIASED BIASED BIASED BIASED BIASED
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    What people tend to forget is that 3200+ is the INITIAL speed from the first batch of CPU's. As with the XP the speed will increase rather rapidly as well as die-quality and tweaks/performance fixes. Athlon XP debuted at what, 1500+ (?) and now ends at 3200+. The A64 going to 90nm will yield some neat increases in available speeds (4800+ anyone?) ;)
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    wtf no 640x480 game benchmarks?

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