AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 - Page 6

SiSoftware Sandra 2004

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices, whether hardware or software.

CPU Arithmetic

Sandra's CPU arithmetic benchmark suite uses 2 famous benchmarks (Dhrystone and Whetstone) for stress testing the processor. Also, it includes a new version of the Whetstone test that makes use of a processor's SSE2 instructions to show the performance boost an application might gain should it be optimized for SSE2. Unfortunately, this does not always represent true real-life performance, but is useful for comparing the speed of various CPUs.

Note:All Intel results are taken as provided by SiSoftware Sandra 2004.

AMD's Athlon FX-55 seems to be lacking in Dhrystone performance compared to the Athlon 64 3800+.

CPU Multimedia

This test involves the generation of Mandelbrot Set fractals that are used to realistically describe and generate natural objects such as mountains or clouds. By using various multi-media extensions (MMX), 3DNow! and SSE(2/3) better performance is achieved.

Here the benchmark ran on all Pentiums taking advantage of their x8 SSE2 instructions for integers and x4 SSE2 for floating points, whereas on our AMD it could make use of its x4 Enhanced MMX and SSE instructions for integers.
However it's with floating point calculations that the 3800+ seems to lag in performance, being placed third.