AMD Phenom II X4 955 Processor Review

Sandra 2009 Memory Bandwidth

Sisoft; Sandra 2009:

The Sisoft Sandra 2009 benchmark utility just came out recently and we have started to include it in our benchmarking. With Sandra 2009 you can now easily compare the performance of the tested device with its speed and its (published) power (TDP)! Sandra XII SP2 also has SSE4 (Intel) and SSE4A (AMD) benchmark code-paths, which is great for those of you testing next-generation AMD & Intel chips.

Results: Sandra 2009 SP2 showed that the AMD Phenom II X4 955 processor had the fourth highest memory bandwidth of all the processors teted. The Intel LGA775 and Phenom I/II processors are never going to get much better than this as the memory controller as the Intel Core i7 series has an integrated memory controller in the processor and triple-channel DDR3 memory. That is the reason it blows away the other Intel and AMD processors.

Editor’s Note: Just for fun we also ran the memory at 800MHz with 4-4-4-12 timings and found the average bandwidth to be reduced to 10,656 MB/s from the 12,949 MB/s shown in the chart above. This goes to show the significance of running the memory at 1066MHz versus 800MHz.