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So far, we have been looking at the system board as a total entity but the one thing driving performance of the system is after all the processor. In our test specimen we are using the VIA Ezra processor with a die size of 52 mm² that harbors the processor core and the 64 kB L1 instrucation and data caches (4 way set associative) along with the 64 kB exclusive L2 cache introduced with the Ezra core. Both L1 and L2 are running at full processor speed. The ALUs are fed through a 12 stage pipeline without capabilities for out of order execution.

Performance enhancements on the processor include a rather elaborate prefetch scheme as it is found on AMD's Palomino and support for MMX and 3DNow! instructions. SSE is not supported. One oddity of the Ezra processor is that it runs the floating point unit at only 1/2 of the processor speed, that is, a 1 GHz C3 processor will have a floating point power equivalent to a 500 MHz PII or III or rather comparable to a K6-2 500 with which it also shares the 3DNow! instruction set. What that tells us is that the processor should work well in applications that are using straight integer instructions without being optimized for SSE but that there are limitations as soon as it comes to floating point intensive applications such as 3D gaming. Keep in mind, though, that the processor by itself is not the sole bottleneck for 3D gaming, the integrated graphics will add their share to the handicap as well.

Floating point intensive applications are, moreover, not restricted to 3D games, any kind of ray tracing and other content creation tasks such as video editing will rely on FPU power as well.

Before we go into the performance of the entire combined system, let's take a quick and dirty look at the isolated processor performance:

SiSoft CPU Arithmetic Benchmark: It is pretty clear that the C3 cannot keep up with any of today's high-end processors but it was not intended to do so in the first place. What is interesting, though, is that the FPU performance that is in all other processors roughly half of the Integer performance is only about 1/4 of the Dhrystone value. This is consistent with the FPU running at 1/2 processor speed.

SiSoft CPU Multimedia Benchmark: As we mentioned above, the C3 is optimized for MMX and 3DNow! and particularly the latter gives the FPU a healthy boost in the relevant benchmarks, at least on a relative scale.

Please keep in mind that we are not trying to belittle the processor or the system but to establish a baseline since system performance can be worse but never better than processor performance.

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