Table of contents
Lame:
Of course, we resorted to our standard benchmarks, first which is lame. While benching we noticed the Hyperthreading of the CPU does increase the performance, so the CPU does shift loads on it's own, even if you run only single-threaded applications. On some applications this will backfire and will be slower compared to Hyperthreading disabled.
Because lame is a small program which should fit at least in the L3 cache, we checked out if triple or dual interface does make a difference. Also we reduced the QPI Link frequency to 4.8Mbps. Surprisingly, a dual channel interface with reduced QPI Link comes close or does overtake the triple channel high bandwidth QPI settings. SMT stands for Hyperthreading enabled.
Just to check if there is any real difference, we used the Everest benchmark to confirm our suspicion that it does not matter much:
