AMD Athlon 64 & Athlon 64 FX - It's Judgment Day

Business Application Performance

When we use the term "business applications" we normally think about computer users sitting in cubicles using their PCs as a part of their daily jobs - checking email, editing documents, flipping through presentations and such. It turns out that a good number of users outside the workplace use their PCs in a "business" oriented fashion, basically using their systems for email, web browsing and document editing.

The Business Winstone 2002 benchmark suite has been with us for quite some time and stresses multitasking environments that incorporate actions such as checking email, browsing the web, editing Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

The nature of these tasks predominantly stresses the integer execution units of modern day microprocessors as well as their load/store units for memory accesses. Given that we're dealing with mostly integer code, a good deal of it happens to be filled with conditional branches (read: if action A then do action B). As we've seen in previous investigations, architectures with shorter pipelines tend to do much better with branch-happy code. So let's look at the results:

Here the performance advantage is clearly AMD; the shorter pipeline of the Athlon 64 combined with the large L2 cache and the on-die memory controller make the Athlon 64 a very strong performer under business applications.