AIDA64 CPU Benchmarks

When development ended for Lavalys EVEREST the team picked up with AIDA64, an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems. Furthermore, complete software, operating system and security information makes AIDA64 a comprehensive system diagnostics tool that offers a total of 100 pages of information about your PC.

All of the benchmarks used in our test bed rely on 64-bit instructions, and consume very low system memory while also being aware of HyperThreading, multi-processors, and multi-core processors. While the AIDA64 CPU tests really serve to compare the processor performance more than it measures platforms, this tool still offers a glimpse into what kind of power each platform possesses. These tests include: Queen, Photoworxx, ZLib, AES, and Hash.

Queen and Photoworxx tests are synthetic benchmarks that operate the function many times over and over-exaggerate by several magnitudes what the real-world performance would be like. The Queen benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and misprediction penalties of the CPU. It does this by finding possible solutions to the classic queen problem on a chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores.

Like the Queen benchmark, the Photoworxx tests for penalties against pipeline architecture. The synthetic Photoworxx benchmark stresses the integer arithmetic and multiplication execution units of the CPU and also the memory subsystem. Due to the fact that this test performs high memory read/write traffic, it cannot effectively scale in situations where more than two processing threads are used. The EVEREST Photoworxx benchmark performs the following tasks on a very large RGB image:

• Fill
• Flip
• Rotate90R (rotate 90 degrees CW)
• Rotate90L (rotate 90 degrees CCW)
• Random (fill the image with random colored pixels)
• RGB2BW (color to black & white conversion)
• Difference
• Crop

The Zip Library test measures combined CPU and memory subsystem performance through the public ZLib compression library. ZLib is designed as a free lossless data compression library for use on virtually any computer hardware and operating system. The ZLib data format is itself portable across platforms and has a footprint independent of input data that can be reduced at some cost in compression.

The AES integer benchmark measures CPU performance using AES data encryption. It utilizes Vincent Rijmen, Antoon Bosselaers and Paulo Barreto's public domain C code in ECB mode and consumes 48 MB of memory.

TEST SUMMARY: AIDA64 does an excellent job of illustrating the difference in processing superiority between mobile and desktop CPUs. The ASRock Nettop ION 330 HTPC (1.6GHz Intel Atom N330/ION GT9400) seems to match up well to the mobile Pentium processor in HP's Pavilion DM3-1044NR notebook (1.3GHz Intel Pentium SU4100/4500M GMA HD). ASRock's Core-100HT HTPC (2.13GHz i3-330M/GMA HD) is only 277MHz behind the ASRock's Vision 3D HTPC (2.4GHz i3-370M/GT425M), which is why both processors produce very similar results in these tests. Although it's not exactly a fair comparison, the quad-core 2.8GHz Core i7-930 desktop processor illustrates just how far (or close) the others are to catching up.

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