The Mandel FPU benchmark measures double precision (also known as 64-bit) floating-point performance through the computation of several frames of the popular "Mandelbrot" fractal. The code behind this benchmark method is written in Assembly, and it is extremely optimized for every popular AMD and Intel processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x86 or SSE2 instruction set extension.

Now if you come from the Commodore 64 / Amiga era like me, you can probably remember rendering Mandelbrot graphics, and it took a full day to complete an image. Amazing where we are right now.

FPU Mandel test again is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core aware. Here's where the Quad processors really kick in. Phenom however was showing really impressive stuff, close to the Q6600.

Memory test

SANDRA has an excellent tool to measure memory bandwidth.

Multi-threaded Video Transcoding VC-1 to WMV9

We'll now startup a series of test that focuses more on the multi-cpu experience with a small varyity of multi-core solutions, including the 8-core Skulltrail setup we recently tested. Here we simulate Video Transcoding: DV to portable device, using two simultaneous threads. Very good performance for the Phenom 9850 BE.