Sandra's CPU arithmetic test consists of two synthetic benchmarks that are used to measure performance of the processor (Dhrystone) and floating point processor (Whetstone). Originally developed in 1984 by Reinhold Weicker, the Dhrystone test measures performance associated with integer and string processing. Results are normally reported in Dhrystones per second, which represent the number of times the benchmark program runs in one second, or more specifically, the number of iterations the program loops per second.

The Whetstone test was developed in the 1960's by Brian Wichmann and is named after the town in England where he lived. The benchmark was refined during the 1970's and became the first major synthetic benchmark for processors. Whetstone is a measurement of the execution speed of floating point instructions and functions on scalar and vector data.

Note that the other Athon XP processor results in the following two charts are based on Sandra's comparison feature. SiSoftware routinely conducts in-house benchmarking on various hardware and adds their results to Sandra's database.

Compared to the Athlon XP 1800+ I previously used, the 2700+ shows a 45% increase in the Dhrystone test. The faster integer performance closely mirrors the 42% increase in clock speed, which rose from 1.53GHz to 2.17GHz. The Athlon's strength is in optimizing the amount of work processed per clock cycle and AMD continues to educating consumers by pointing out that relying on clock speed alone isn't the only factor in measuring processor performance.

While doing research on processors, I ran across the following web page that contains a Java enabled Dhrystone benchmark and received a score of 3,443,526 Dhrystones per second. Give it a go to see how your CPU measures up!

The Sandra Multimedia test renders an 860x750 pixel image of a Mandelbrot fractal using 255 iterations per pixel in 32 colors. The test contains two versions - one using integers to simulate floating point numbers and a second using floating point numbers exclusively. Each test makes use of the various instruction sets specific to the Athlon/Athlon XP (3DNow!, 3DNow!/Enhanced) and Pentium 4 (MMX, MMX Enhanced, SSE, SSE2) processors.