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. Although the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 does make up some definite ground in the Memory Bandwidth benchmark, this test seems to take full advantage of AMD's integrated memory controller, and these outperform the Core 2 competition. But when taken from an Intel perspective, the improvements in memory performance are clear, and the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 represents a significant jump over even the Core 2 Extreme QX9650.

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.

The Cache & Memory benchmark is another one that shows off the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 and its FSB1600 quite well, and it scores extremely high in this test. Also notice how close the performance of the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 and QX6850 is, and it's pretty clear that core speed alone is not responsible for the jump.

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. Here we see the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 taking the overall performance crown, reversing the previous victory the Core 2 Extreme QX6850 had over the QX9650.

The second part of the test measures the inter-core latency, where the presence of high-speed, quad core processors running on the 1600 MHz bus certainly drops the latency even lower, and gives the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 the best score.