Benchmarking

I created a benchmark to be run in one of our simulation programs. Our "big machine" in the lab is a quad-core Xeon E5430 machine with 32GB ECC ram. I always go to cpubenchmark.net to see benchmarks based on their own passmark software to get an idea of where a CPU ranks and I think it gives a generally good idea of what to expect. There, the E5430 scores 4,095 while the AMD 8350 scores 9,378 for a ratio of 2.29x. But this is for a benchmarking suite, but what about our math heavy benchmark that should be more suited to the traditional server grade crunching machines with Xeons?

Passmark
Xeon E5430: 4095
AMD 8350: 9378
ratio: 2.29x

Simulation Benchmark:
Xeon E5430: 627 seconds
AMD 8350: 337 seconds
ratio: 1.86x

So we are sitting at 1.86x which is below the Passmark result, but I think within reason given that I am using a home-user grade cpu vs. a server-grade cpu in a mathematics contest. During the sim we do use about 60% of the RAM which is about 20 GB which is cool. I am happy with this performance. The AMD 8350 costs $220 now, but the Xeon cost about $500 four years ago. Add in the cost of the more expensive motherboard and stuff and you have quite a nice performance/cost improvement seen here.

Coming soon... overclocking results.