i7 benchmarks - HEAVY multitasking?

[Atech]

I just did a quick google, but all I found were "garbage".

Does anyone have any decent benchmarks/reviews that not just run 1 program, but like a horde of programs (gaming, encoding, playing media ect) at the same time?

I find it odd that most benchmarks focus on one program at the time on a qaudcore with HT...

 

[Flexion]

That would be a bit difficult to do, as a comparison would require the same apps running the same way on identical systems but different processor configurations and so on, it would be hard to keep the findings objective. This doesn't mean that running one benchmark doesn't stress these processors though. Multithreaded apps benchmarks are a good indicator of the raw "horsepower" of such CPUs.

Someone would need to batch the programs, script the commands for a few different benchies and run them while recording with a stopwatch or something.

Running multiple benchmarks at the same time and/or in a loop work as stability tests, but as a peformance indicator, results between runs would be hard to reproduce and varied.

 

[Atech]

I just find it odd that CPU's are still being benchmarked the way they did when we talked single-core CPU's.

The i7 is supposed to shine in heavy multitasking, so the testing done dosn't seem to be, to use the stance of [H]ard, realworld.

 

[Flexion]

Yeah but real world and benchies don't usually correlate well. I don't think most people can multitask faster than our modern processors. The advantage is for multithreading. HT tech makes a proper comeback on core i7 and is finally useful. So you are right on the processor shining on multitasking.

But this is again subjective on your personal computing experience and hard to make tangible/objective performance indications.

You may not know it but your computer is probably multitasking all the time. Given that most OSes have 50-100 threads running at the same time.

 

[Atech]

Yeah but real world and benchies don't usually correlate well. I don't think most people can multitask faster than our modern processors. The advantage is for multithreading. HT tech makes a proper comeback on core i7 and is finally useful. So you are right on the processor shining on multitasking.

But this is again subjective on your personal computing experience and hard to make tangible/objective performance indications.

You may not know it but your computer is probably multitasking all the time. Given that most OSes have 50-100 threads running at the same time.

That is why the title includes "HEAVY"

 

[Impulse]

There's plenty of benchmarks out there that employ multi-threaded apps (which are effectively multi-tasking for you) which will load all cores and have multiple threads going across each core... Replicating results w/several programs at the same time w/multiple processors would be a nightmare. Even if you mess w/the priorities and script it all, one program might randomly take up a lil' bit more resources on one run than the other and finish sooner or later, etc. and it's gonna skew the results all to hell.

We didn't run multi-threaded apps as benchmarks when we had single-core CPUs, so I don't see how you think the same tests are being run w/today's CPUs... You think that you can switch between apps and demand more out of the system any faster than a multi-threaded program can? System responsiveness isn't always directly tied to performance, half the time it's just how the OS treats tasks and how the UI is coded to respond to slow-downs (i.e. some people find a green bar more pleasing than a spinning hourglass or a frozen menu and may tell you completely different stories about how the same system responds).

I'm not saying that it isn't important btw, I'm just saying it's highly subjective and much harder to isolate than let's say... Responsiveness within a game where it's a much more controlled environment so your particular experience isn't quite as subjective.