Performance analysis of Intel Core 2 Duo processor

With the emergence of thread level parallelism as a more efficient method of improving processor performance, Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) technology is being more widely used in developing processor architectures. Also, the widening gap between CPU and memory speed has evoked the interest of researchers to understand performance of memory hierarchical architectures. As part of this research, performance characteristic studies were carried out on the Intel Core 2 Duo, a dual core power efficient processor, using a variety of new generation benchmarks. This study provides a detailed analysis of the memory hierarchy performance and the performance scalability between single and dual core processors. The behavior of SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks running on Intel Core 2 Duo processor is also explained. Lastly, the overall execution time and throughput measurement using both multi-programmed and multi-threaded workloads for the Intel Core 2 Duo processor is reported and compared to that of the Intel Pentium D and AMD Athlon 64X2 processors. Results showed that the Intel Core 2 Duo had the best performance for a variety of workloads due to its advanced micro-architectural features such as the shared L2 cache, fast cache to cache communication and smart memory access.

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