User manual SONY VAIO VPC-EA2UFX

[. . . ] Nothing herein should be construed as constituting a further or additional warranty. This publication does not constitute an endorsement of the product or products that were tested. The configuration or configurations tested or described may or may not be the only available solution. This test is not a determination of product quality or correctness, nor does it ensure compliance with any federal, state or local requirements. [. . . ] All other product names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. Comparison of Intel Pentium III and Pentium 4 Processor Performance White Paper prepared by Workstations Division Engineering First Edition (October 2001) Document Number 15WD-1101A-WWEN Comparison of Intel Pentium III and Pentium 4 Processor Performance White Paper 3 Introduction This White Paper provides information useful in understanding the differences between the Intel Pentium 4 processor and the previous-generation Pentium III. A discussion is included about the architectural differences in the two processors and the performance benefits they provide. When evaluating performance, there is no single performance test ("benchmark") that can completely describe the performance of a complex system like modern microprocessor or personal computer. It is important to obtain the complete performance picture. In other words, the system should deliver high performance across the entire spectrum of applications such as productivity, multimedia, 3D and Internet. Each of these application categories caries a unique set of computation and data movement characteristics; thus it is important to realize how each class of application would benefit or not from the new architecture. It is also important to realize the investment protection delivered, where the new architecture will provide reasonable performance gain for current applications while providing headroom for future growth as more and more ISVs will fully take advantage of the new architecture. With that in mind, it is expected that there is a non-uniform gain in performance, as each class of current application lends itself more to the new architecture while others do not. Using the Compaq Deskpro EN platform equipped with 1 GHz Pentium III processor as the baseline, benchmark results of the new Compaq Evo D500 platform equipped with the 1. 7 GHz Pentium 4 processor are presented as a comparison of the two architectures. Comparison of Pentium 4 and Pentium III Architecture Benefits As Internet and digital media become more pervasive in modern computing, the Pentium 4 processor is optimized for a new level of digital audio, video, photography and 3D performance. For corporate users, the Pentium 4 offers excellent performance with added headroom for future applications such as Java technology and XML, which will be increasingly enabled in Office XP, Windows XP and Web services Enhanced 3D rendering for business analysis, video decompression for e-learning, and peerto-peer interaction for improved collaboration Secure connections with support for latest encryption technology for data transfer and eCommerce transactions. How are these potential enhancements possible with this new processor?As a result, these applications scale very well with frequency and benefit greatly from the new architecture of the Pentium 4. However, integer-based and basic office productivity applications tend to have more random branches in application code, thus are more difficult to predict. The result is less efficient use of the Pentium 4 architecture on these applications. However, since Pentium 4 processors are available at higher frequencies than Pentium III, performance is still enhanced according to the performance equation. SYSmark 2001 SYSmark2001 is a suite of application software and associated benchmark workloads developed by Applications Performance Corporation (BAPCO). It is a tool that measures system performance on popular business-oriented applications in the Microsoft Windows operation system. SYSmark contains twelve (12) application workloads that are divided into two categories: Office Productivity and Internet Content Creation. Comparison of Intel Pentium III and Pentium 4 Processor Performance White Paper 6 Figure 2: Comparison of Pentium III with Pentium 4 in SYSmark 2001 Benchmark Tests Figure 2 clearly illustrates the Pentium 4 performance advantages over Pentium III. It is also clear that performance gains in the Office Productivity workload are less dramatic when compared to Internet Content Creation workload. In the Internet Content Creation workload, where the typical workload is streamed in nature (Windows Media Encode for example), the application tends to have branches that are very predictable resulting in performance that scales very well with frequency and benefits greatly from the new architecture of the Pentium 4. 3D WinBench 2000 Processor Test 3D WinBench 2000 measures systemlevel 3D performance, including CPU and graphics subsystem. To understand the processor 3D performance, this benchmark suite includes the Processor Test which measures the CPU-intensive portion of the 3D graphics pipeline geometry and setup stage. Comparison of Intel Pentium III and Pentium 4 Processor Performance White Paper 7 Figure 3: Comparison of Pentium III and Pentium 4 in 3D Winbench 2000 Processor Test To display 3D objects on a 2D computer screen, it is much easier to represent 3D objects as a collection of polygons (usually triangles) than as curved surfaces. The larger the number of triangles used to represent the 3D object, the more closely the approximation of the mathematical description resembles the 3D object. The process of breaking up a 3D object into triangles is called tessellation and involves an enormous number of floating-point vector calculations. [. . . ] The CPU index performance gain in the 3D Winbench 2000 Processor Test, benchmark, illustrated in Figure 3, resulted from the increase in floating-point performance of the Pentium 4 processor. Comparison of Intel Pentium III and Pentium 4 Processor Performance White Paper 8 Summary The Pentium 4 architecture offers significant innovations compared to earlier Pentium III technology. These innovations lead to breakthroughs in performance that are measured and substantiated by testing reported in this white paper. The Pentium 4 processor is optimized for large data sets transfer and handling, so customers will see significantly improved performance over previous generation Pentium III processors in applications that handle and require large amounts of data. Floating-point-based multimedia applications tend to have branches that are very predictable and thus have a higher IPC (Instructions executed Per Clock) potential. [. . . ]