Memory performance and scalability of Intel’s and AMD’s dual-core processors: a case study

As Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) has become the mainstream in processor architectures, Intel and AMD have introduced their dual-core processors to the PC market. In this paper, performance studies on an Intel Core 2 Duo, an Intel Pentium D and an AMD Athlon 64X2 processor are reported. According to the design specifications, key derivations exist in the critical memory hierarchy architecture among these dual-core processors. In addition to the overall execution time and throughput measurement using both multi-programmed and multi-threaded workloads, this paper provides detailed analysis on the memory hierarchy performance and on the performance scalability be-tween single and dual cores. Our results indicate that for the best performance and scalability, it is impor-tant to have (1) fast cache-to-cache communication, (2) large L2 or shared capacity, (3) fast L2 to core latency, and (4) fair cache resource sharing. Three dual-core processors that we studied have shown benefits of some of these factors, but not all of them. Core 2 Duo has the best performance for most of the workloads because of its microarchitecture features such as shared L2 cache. Pentium D shows the worst performance in many aspects due to its technology-remap of Pentium 4. 1