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Bus Frequency Influence on Core 2 Duo Performance
It is evident that quad-core processors will benefit most of all from the transition to 1333MHz bus. They consist of two dual-core halves, each featuring its own L2 cache, and they use front side bus to transfer data between them through system memory. As for the dual-core Core 2 Duo processors, they will improve their performance only thanks to the increased bandwidth of the bus between the processor and the memory. The shift to 1333MHz bus will push the data transfer rate from 8.5 to 10.7GB/s.
In this respect it is extremely interesting to find out how the processor bus frequency affects the performance of Core 2 Duo processors in popular applications. To answer this question we compared the performance of Core 2 Duo E6750 CPU with 1333MHz bus (8 x 333MHz) and Core 2 Duo E6700 CPU with 1067MHz bus (10 x 266MHz). Both processors work at the same clock speed of 2.66GHz.
Core 2 Duo E6750 | Core 2 Duo E6700 | Performance | |
3DMark06 | 10492 | 10364 | 1.2% |
3DMark06, CPU | 2374 | 2298 | 3.3% |
PCMark05 | 8390 | 8325 | 0.8% |
PCMark05, CPU | 6765 | 6521 | 3.7% |
Word 2007, sec | 42 | 43 | 2.4% |
Excel 2007, sec | 43.09 | 43.57 | 1.1% |
7-Zip 4.45, Compressing, | 3847 | 3799 | 1.3% |
AutoGK 2.4/Xvid 1.2, fps | 39.15 | 38.2 | 2.5% |
AutoGK 2.4/DivX 6.6, fps | 57.73 | 57.11 | 1.1% |
H.264 Encoding, | 354 | 359 | 1.4% |
mp3 Encoding, | 123 | 124 | 0.8% |
Photoshop CS3, sec | 82 | 84 | 2.4% |
Sonar 6.2, sec | 119 | 119 | 0.0% |
Premiere Pro 2.0, sec | 190 | 192 | 1.1% |
3ds Max 8 (SPECapc), | 4.02 | 3.96 | 1.5% |
CINEBENCH 9.5 | 835 | 825 | 1.2% |
ScienceMark 2.0, | 1433 | 1433 | 0.0% |
Fritz 9 Chess Benchmark | 3868 | 3784 | 2.2% |
Quake 4, | 122.53 | 116.76 | 4.9% |
Half-Life 2, 1024x768 | 116.42 | 114.92 | 1.3% |
F.E.A.R., Medium Quality | 107 | 105 | 1.9% |
Company of Heroes, | 167.4 | 164.1 | 2.0% |
Supreme Commander | 16428 | 16384 | 0.3% |
Valve Source Engine | 49 | 48 | 2.1% |
The obtained results indicate clearly that the system performance improves just insignificantly from the transfer of the new dual-core processors on Core micro-architecture to faster bus. The performance gain in most cases is only 1%-2%. The maximum performance improvement of 5% occurs in Quake 4, but it is more of an exception, really.
