Evaluating the performance of single and multiple core processors with PCMARK®05 and benchmark analysis

PCMark®05 [4, 8] is a highly popular synthetic benchmark for evaluating the performance of personal computers (PCs) with millions of downloads via the Internet. Based on open source and commercial applications, it measures the execution time of highly representative code extracts of these applications and reports scores reflecting the overall system performance, the CPU performance, the memory subsystem performance, the graphics subsystem performance, and the disk subsystem performance. In this article, we focus on the PCMark®05 CPU test suite which is composed of 8 tests to measure the performance and scalability of various Intel single- and dual-core processors. Six of these tests run a single application each. One test runs 2 multitasked applications in parallel and another test runs 4 multitasked applications simultaneously. We present the results of executing this benchmark's CPU test suite on high end Intel-based PC platforms with top of the line single processor and dual core processors, present the results of our profiling and hotspot analysis, shed some light on this test suite's prominent microarchitecture events and its active threads' distributions, and characterize this suite's workload. These results help in understanding the performance characteristics of this popular benchmark and in guiding future processor design enhancements.