Intel Westmere 32nm Launch & Clarkdale Core i5-661 CPU Review

Synthetic Benchmarks: CPU & Cache

Lavalys Everest Ultimate v5.02

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all benchmarkers or overclockers. With the ability to pick up most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms on your desktop. We selected two of Everest's seven CPU benchmarks: CPU Queen and FPU Mandel. According to Lavalys, CPU Queen simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic "Queens problem" on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. The FPU Mandel benchmark measures the double precision (also known as 64-bit) floating-point performance through the computation of several frames of the popular "Mandelbrot" fractal. Both tests consume less than 1 MB system memory, and are HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware.


This is not a bad first showing for the i5-661, coming a hair ahead of AMD's Phenom II X4 945, and a little bit behind the i5-750 in the CPU Queen benchmark. The FPU Mandel results are not quite as impressive though, and the Clarkdale chip falls a fair bit behind the proper quad-core models.


Lavalys Everest Ultimate v5.02

As part of its enthusiast favourite Cache & Memory Benchmark, Everest provides very useful and in-depth cache performance figures. For this chart, we have combined the read, write, and copy bandwidth figures to achieve an aggregate bandwidth figure for each cache stage.


These results are pretty much what we expected. The i5-661 and i7-870 effectively have the same cache bandwidth due to the fact that their L3 cache both runs at 2400Mhz, and they both clock up to 3.6Ghz during this test.