Super PI Mod

Super PI Mod 1.5 calculates pi to a specific number of digits after the decimal point. We elected to use 1 million digits (1M). The result is given in the form of the time taken to finish the calculation (in seconds). However, it is a single-threaded benchmark, so it's only useful as an indication of how fast these processors are with older, single-threaded applications.

Calculation Time

The Super PI calculation time scaled well according to the clock speed of the processors, irrespective of the number of processing cores. It's what you would expect of single-threaded applications.

The quad-core QX9650 and the dual-core E8400 both ran at 3.0 GHz and took virtually the same amount of time to complete the calculations. The same was true for the quad-core Q9550 and the dual-core E8300, both running at 2.83 GHz. The dual-core E8600 was the fastest Core 2 processor in this comparison merely because of its higher clock speed.

The results of the 45nm processors show just how effective the new 45nm processors' larger L2 cache can be. Even though the QX9650 ran at the same core and FSB speeds as the QX6850, it was significantly faster, shaving 1.8 seconds (10.3%) off the QX6850's calculation time. Even the Q9550 which only ran at 2.83 GHz was faster than the 3.0 GHz QX6850. Similarly, the 2.66 GHz E8200 was faster than the E8650 which ran at 3.0 GHz.

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