Intel Core 2 Extreme Mobile X9000 on the Dell M1730

Sandra Multimedia

This benchmark generates a picture (640×480) of the well-known Mandelbrot fractal, using 255 iterations for each data pixel, in 32 colours. It is a real-life benchmark rather than a synthetic benchmark, designed to show the improvements MMX/Enhanced, 3DNow!/Enhanced, SSE(2) bring to such an algorithm. The benchmark is multi-threaded for up to 64 CPUs maximum on SMP systems.

The benchmark contains many versions (ALU, MMX, (Wireless) MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSSE3) that use integers to simulate floating point numbers, as well as many versions that use floating point numbers (FPU, SSE, SSE2, SSSE3). This illustrates the difference between ALU and FPU power.

Test Results:The Sandra Multi-Media benchmark showed that the Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 was significantly faster than the other processors I compared it against. When I overclocked the Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 processor turned into a monster and stole the show as you can see in the chart above.