SDRAM vs. RDRAM, Facts and Fantasy

Overview

Before we lay out the configurations of the systems used in benchmarking, let's take a closer look at BAPco's SYSmark 2000 and how exactly it works, and why we feel it is one of the most objective and comprehensive benchmarks available.

SYSmark 2000 is the latest release in the SYSmark family of benchmarking products designed and developed by the members of Business Applications Performance Corporation (BAPCo). In 1992, BAPCo developed the concept of application-based benchmarking using popular business software. Ever since the inception of SYSmark 92, others have been developed using the same concept. BAPCo’s SYSmark 2000 adheres to the concept by offering a new suite of application-based benchmarks consisting of today's popular business applications. Particular emphasis has been given to Internet-related operations. It is a suite of twelve application-based tests to accurately evaluate and characterize the performance of a computer system. The advantage of using it lies in the weighting of its workloads, which reflect those of real applications. It allows comparisons between computer systems based on applications running on Windows 2000, NT 4.0, 98, and 95.

Benchmark Structure

SYSmark 2000 contains twelve application workloads and a ‘workload manager’ application responsible for setting them up, timing their execution, and reporting performance results. Each workload consists of a real application (for example, Adobe Photoshop) and a test script that sends commands to the application.

They are divided into two categories; the Office Productivity category contains CorelDRAW 9, Microsoft Excel 2000, Dragon Systems NaturallySpeaking Preferred 4.0, Netscape Communicator 4.61, Corel Paradox 9, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, and Microsoft Word 2000. The Internet Content Creation category contains MetaCreations Bryce 4, Avid Elastic Reality 3.1, Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Adobe Premiere 5.1, and Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 4.0.

Rating Methodology

After SYSmark 2000 is run, it assigns the system a performance rating for each application, a rating for each category, and an overall rating. Application ratings are based on a comparison with a fixed calibration platform. A rating of 100 indicates the test system has performance equal to that of the calibration platform, a rating of 200 indicates twice the performance, etc. Each category rating is simply a geometric mean of the workload ratings in the category. The overall rating is a weighted geometric mean of the category ratings. The SYSmark 2000 calibration platform has the following configuration:

CPU : Intel Pentium III 450 MHz at 100 MHz FSB
Motherboard : Based on the Intel i440BX chipset
Memory : 128 MB PC100 SDRAM
Videocard : Diamond Viper V770 Ultra 32 MB
Harddisk : IBM DJNA 371800
Operating System : Windows 98 SE, typical installation

Office Productivity

Corel CorelDraw 9.0

This script first takes an abstract design and applies a Corel ‘Art Stroke’ to it and then runs various filter effects (spheroid, charcoal, etc). It then creates and manipulates a scene composed of vector graphics. Next, it takes a raster image and applies several effects (add noise, blur, etc). It also creates several 3D objects and performs various 3D manipulations. Finally, it collates several of the images it created and publishes them as a web site.

Corel Paradox 9.0

Paradox imports a large text file and creates a database table (tens of thousands of entries). It does some SQL-style queries on this table, and also runs a find duplicates query. Next, it continues to import several other text files, formatting them and then exporting each to HTML. Then, it opens up some query forms and enters some more data and produces reports based on queries. Each of these reports is exported to HTML.

Microsoft Word 2000

The Microsoft Word 2000 workload invokes a range of word processing functions including editing, spell checking, search and replace, font change, copy and paste text, print preview, merge mail fields, insert hyperlinks, background and table formatting and opening and viewing HTML pages.

Microsoft Excel 2000

Operations in the Excel workload include closing and opening spreadsheets, HTML pages and data in text files, spell checks, editing, formula calculation, plotting data in chart or histogram, formatting charts and cells, analyzing data in Pivot tables and naming a cell and inserting hyperlinks.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2000

Operations in the PowerPoint workload include closing and opening PowerPoint slides and HTML pages, spell checking, editing, formatting and moving pictures, applying templates, formatting tables in slides, inserting hyperlinks, applying header and footer information, formatting and rotating charts, applying graphic and sound effects and adding movie files.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 4.0

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred v4.0 is a continuous speech recognition application that converts speech into text. The script plays a pre-recorded wave file (a recorded speech) using Dragon's PlayWave utility. The utility feeds this wave file into NaturallySpeaking which then converts the wave file to text.

Netscape Communicator 4.61

The Netscape Communicator script simulates a user loading, viewing and navigating common web pages. First, it opens up a web site of Shakespeare plays and selects and loads the entire texts several times. Then, the script loads a page consisting of large tables, thumbnails and images, and cycles through viewing the images. Next, the script loads many pages that contain mixes of graphics, tables, and text and does a lot of text searching through these web pages.

Internet Content Creation

Adobe Premiere 5.1

This script composes several pictures, video clips and audio clips into a movie. It creates an animation of approximately 16 BMP files and some AVI clips, and puts various transitions between them (like scrolling text, fade outs, etc). It also superimposes two audio tracks and runs the audio through several filters, such as reverb effects, etc. The final video is a compressed AVI file.

Adobe Photoshop 5.5

The script uses the following operations: load, resize, zooming out images, applying a number of filters to the images, changing the mode and color settings of images, adjusting image brightness and contrast and saving the image to a JPEG file that is optimized for web use.

Avid Elastic Reality 3.1

Avid Elastic Reality 3.1 is an image processing application used to create ‘morphs’ between images. The Elastic Reality workload sets up and renders a morph between two MPEG2-sized images (720x480 pixels, roughly 750 kB). The workload has three phases; image loading, morph definition, and morph rendering. The rendering phase takes the majority of the workload run time.

Metacreation's Bryce 4

Bryce 4.0 is a ray tracing application where the user can create still and animated scenes, depicting real or fantasy objects and terrain. Those wire frame scenes are rendered, with realistic effects of light and shadow, as well as realistic interaction in animated scenes between the materials used in the objects and terrain. The Bryce 4.0 script opens an assembled wire frame scene and renders it to the final image. Once completed, the script opens a new image and saves it in Metastream video format, suitable for use as streaming video on the Internet. After saving in Metastream format, the script opens another image and saves it in HTML format, for use in Web pages.

Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 4.0

Media Encoder encodes audio and video content into an Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) stream. The output from Media Encoder is a stream of information that can be heard or viewed with Microsoft Windows Media Player, or sent to a server for multicasting, unicasting, or storage. The input file is AVI clip which is encoded using MPEG-4 Video Codec.