Benchmarks Archive

ATI Technologies admits cheating the drivers to achieve higher 3DMark03 score, while ExtremeTech's exhaustive testing of both nVidia and ATI 3D hardware with the newest version of 3DMark2003 confirms Futuremark's findings of unfair optimizations by both companies.

HP hoisted its Superdome-Itanium-Windows combination to the top of the premier OLTP scalability benchmark on Tuesday, about a month after originally gaining the top spot and little more than a week after IBM displaced the combo with a system based on its own AIX/RISC/DB2 stack. Also, Microsoft gained ground on its database rivals in 2002, despite a decline in sales for the market as a whole, according to research published Wednesday by Gartner Dataquest.

Adobe put a page up (named 'pcpreferred.html') stating that the PC is preffered to run Adobe products. Adobe, along with Quark and Macromedia, are the long standing allies to Apple, offering the most important products that literally drive Mac sales in the Pro market. For historical reasons mostly, it is now of surprise to see Adobe openly verifying and backing up Digital Producer Magazine's benchmarks and recommending PCs instead of Macs to their customers (even if PCs have indeed overtake Macs speed-wise the last 1-2 years). This is a blow for Apple, sales and marketing-wise and we will wait for a reaction from Apple towards Adobe.

From MacNN: Rob Galbraith has posted an article on digital file transfers, comparing an Alienware Laptop, a discontinued Dell Desktop and a MDD Dual 1.25GHz PowerMac in RAW photo and Photoshop batch processing. The article concludes that the Windows machines beat the Mac in virtually all of the benchmarks:

Preliminary Pentium 4 numbers are here. Scott R. Ladd extended the tables, keeping the Pentium III numbers for comparison purposes. You'll find specifications for both test systems. The new tests show that ICC is the choice if you need Pentium4 optimizations for your applications, while GCC is a good free alternative for the rest of the CPUs. ICC seems to compile up to twice faster in most cases.

"The latest gcc holds it own against Intel C++, winning some benchmarks it lost previously. There are still applications where Intel shines, but the differences between the compilers have narrowed. So which compiler is better? Like Einstein, I have to say the answer is relative." Read the article here.

We reported on this a few days ago, but now the article is updated 8/17/02 with 'streamlined' graphs, tweaked verbiage, and addition of a very interesting Memory Speed Graph. Page Two added on 8/20/02 with additional tests. Updated 8/21/02 with another bottleneck theory and Memory Speed Graph interpretation. Read the updated benchmarks here and here. What will it take to fix the bottleneck, the conclusion asks? The author replies: A CPU than can handle the full speed of DDR memory (like the fabled PPC 7470) and a redesigned motherboard with separate bus for each CPU.

Developer Jean-Baptiste Queru wrote a short editorial regarding the SPEC benchmarks and how modern CPUs are competing these days based on the specific benchmarks. JBQ talks about the Pentium4, AthlonXPs, Itanium and especially about the G4. Update: JBQ just wrote a redux article.

Scott Robert Ladd has updated his GCC versus Intel C++ compiler benchmarks. This time round he includes updated results of the recently released GCC 3.1. The new version of GCC seems to be much better than its 3.0.4 predecessor, and GCC 3.1 even wins some benchmarks it lost previously over ICC. Overall, ICC remains a much faster C/C++ compiler, but GCC has successfully narrowed the gap. Read Scott's interesting conclusion at the end of the article too.

"After seeing the results of these tests, we can only conclude that Apple's fastest G4 workstations are certainly not faster than dual 1.533MHz Athlon MP-equipped systems, at least as far as After Effects is concerned. Not one of the objective tests we conducted using After Effects showed Apple's flagship machine to be superior. In fact, in most of the tests, the Mac was left lagging far behind. And, this was when we were using a PC whose chips are now three steps below the fastest Athlons available (now the fastest Athlon XP is the 2100+ running at 1.73GHz), and far slower than benchmarks have shown the latest Intel Xeon chips to be, now shipping at 2.4 GHz." The benchmark is held at DigitalVideoEditing. Our Take: We would like to see the benchmarks with dual Athlon MPs or dual PIIIs at 1 Ghz, so it would be more fair, Mhz-wise. On the other hand, Mhz doesn't matter. Right Steve? And at the end of the day, this was the fastest G4 available. The Dual AthlonMP 1.5 is not the fastest available anymore in the PC world (dual SMT Xeon 2.4 Ghz at the same price as the dual G4 1 Ghz anyone?). BTW, it seems that the Mac users feel left behind these days.

"Partha Narayanan, from IBM, recently posted some benchmark perfomance results for Ingo's O(1) Scheduler. The tests were run on an 8-way 700Mhz Pentium III, with several comparisons. The end result is around an 18% improvement with a single CPU, around a 45% improvement with 4 CPUs, and around a 187% improvement with 8 CPUs. Pretty impressive!" Read the rest of the article and see the benchmark results at KernelTrap.

"In my October, Byte.com column I described the new VM written by kernel hacker Andrea Arcangeli. In that article, I promised I would come back to my FreeBSD versus Linux comparison that I ran in my February 2001 column. Many people say FreeBSD has a very good virtual memory manager. As it turns out, I pretty much proved them right in that article. Now, with the new VM engine in Linux as of 2.4.10, things might look different, so I prepared a new test environment for the benchmark." Moshe Bar benchmarks the VMs between Linux and the previous FreeBSD, version 4.3.

"We've already posted our (WindowsXP) review, and we've already posted some tweaks you can do to get your new XP system up and going. Now we're finally posting the one thing you guys probably wanted to see first - the numbers. Raw data on how this puppy performs." FiringSquad is up to the task to measure XP's performance on games, productivity and more.