What is Reddit's opinion of SiSoftware Sandra?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

"Quick" is relative. Compared to reading from CPU cache or RAM, basically every data access is slow as Christmas.

In rough numbers (for a Intel i5-2500K (Sandy Bridge), at 3.3 GHz, which is about 4 years old now), L1 cache (the fastest) is 4 clock cycles (1.21 nanoseconds). L3 cache (the "slowest") is 13-28 clock cycles (3.9 to 8.48 nanoseconds), depending upon whether the access is sequential, or more random.

If the machine has 1600 MHz DDR2 RAM, access would take 7.7 to 75.6 nanoseconds, again depending upon how random the access is.

(This data comes from here, the charts at the bottom)

A fast SSD can do 100,000 I/O operations per second, for completely random access (sequential is faster, because you don't have to seek/load address lines for each block). That's one I/O operation every 10 microseconds (10,000 nanoseconds). A Seagate Savvio 15K.1 15,000 RPM hard drive has an access time of 5.6 milliseconds (5,600,000 nanoseconds).

For streaming/downloading, the remote computer has to pull the data from somewhere, either disk or maybe RAM, before sending it to you, but that part doesn't matter much. The much larger portion is traveling over the network. Let's use ping time as a rough surrogate for the time it takes to send a request and get a response, without any data access on the other side. To ping my wireless router from my laptop takes 1.6 milliseconds (1,600,000 nanoseconds, about a million times slower than that L1 cache access). My ping time to reddit is at least 18 ms (18,000,000 nanoseconds, or 10 million times the L1 cache access). Any actual request will take more time to receive and process the request and create and send the response.

And, of course, there are 1,000,000,000 nanoseconds in a second.

Well, I was going to suggest FX 8350 because I thought FSX scaled across a ton of cores like xplane, but FSX looks like it's poorly coded and it used to only use one core and now it barely uses 4.

For FSX it looks like you want the fastest single core performance you can get.

IB is only faster because it has better turbo. http://www.sisoftware.net/?d=qa&f=cpu_ivb

If you plan on overclocking, stay with that 2500k since it overclocks better and has the same IPC. If you don't want to overclock, grab the 3570k since it'll have a better working turbo and run better since it's at higher frequency more often than 2500k.

Those two apps are not true testing tools. I'm using Folding@Home and a CPU Stress Tester (found on F@H site) I'm just using them to stress the server's CPU's fro and extended period of time to see if it fails at any time. If it fails most likely it will be due to heat. The server is not in a data center with dedicated cooling. Its in my office (~78F) on my work bench with regular air conditioning.

There are other testing tools like PRIME95, MEMTEST (almost all Linux boot disks have it). All those I listed are free. The only one I know if that is a semi-professional stress test tool is SANDRA SiSoft. It does CPU, RAM, HDD and records temperatures and logs it in an Excel-type file. I have not used that in years and I think they have a demo version, but you have to pay for a full version.

If you want a true "Stress Test Tool" be sure it can stress all key components, log temperatures and have a remote app that can monitor and record whatever you're testing. It is quite pointless to run the tool on a box that could crash... how would you know how and when it crashed or even if you can assume the data it was recording was actually recorded or not corrupted.

Someone else here might know of a real product.

SiSoft reports core-to-core latencies. Its a free download/trial but it requires an installer / admin rights.

https://i.imgur.com/MoBknYD.png

U0-U1 are part of the same hyperthread, so they share L1 cache and everything. 16ns latency. U0-U2 is actually a different core.

EDIT: There's an option for "multi-core" test, which only tests core-to-core and disables hyperthreads. On something like a 24-core system, it probably will run faster, since there are fewer combinations it has to tally up.

Signal 11 means the program tried to access memory that wasn't assigned to it or was outside of memory bounds. This could be an error in the program or it could indicate a hardware issue.

Check your memory: http://www.memtest86.com/

Could also be heat issues, with the memory or CPU or even Hard Disk drive issues, if data is being corrupted coming out of on disk memory swap space, look for a disk diagnostic tool that will do read/write verification. SiSoftware has some good tools. http://www.sisoftware.net/

If you want to prioritize MATLAB performance and money is no object: Get a skylake-x (or wait for the refresh to get released).Despite bieng bit older, it still completely blows away the newest mainstream intel and amd chips (and thats "just" the 10-core model).

If you want to prioritize MATLAB performance but doont want to spend for an (admittedly rather expenssive) skylake-x rig: go for one of the intel chips. Intel does quite a bit better in MATLAB fr 2 main reasons: 1) Matlab uses MKL (which is intel's software) for matrix operations, and 2) Intel has much better SIMD/AVX performance (most of the "fast" algorithms in MATLAB get a lot of their speed by using the SIMD registers to run operations vectorized).

If you want to prioritize general computer usage and price/performance: get one of the Ryzen chips. MATLAB wont run as fast, but depending on what you intend to use MATLAB for maybe that is OK. If you never run anything that takes more than a couple seconds then it doesn't really matter if it takes 2 seconds or 4 seconds to run.

I don't think Cinebench would be an appropriate test as the FPU is shared between threads. You'd need some L2 cache heavy benchmark that's heavily multi-threaded on integer workloads, I guess. Or even simply running a benchmark that tests cache latency might be interesting. Perhaps this?
http://www.sisoftware.net/?d=qa&f=ben_mem_latency&l=en&a=

Benchmarks don't agree with you.

4th gen i7s put out about 3x the performance per watt.

Might be time to open a ticket with CCP then. I'd suggest getting an app that probes your PC and gets all the details so they have all the versions and such. Good one (IMHO): http://www.sisoftware.net/

They will ask you for this.

Can you run some generic benchmark like Sandra. I am interested in what kind of results you get, especially memory and CPU speeds compared to their results.

http://www.sisoftware.net/

EDIT: Please post the results here as well!

Yeah you're probably right, now I think about the different data sets it makes sense, and I can't think of a scenario in gaming where you'd have contiguous memory that'd need to be accessed multiple times.

The only thing I could come up with was for physics calculations (maybe with many items colliding), but with nvidia doing some physics processing on the GPU now that's out too.

I did some research though and found this which was interesting.

If chkdsk doesn't find anything, try a utility that reads the drive's SMART data.

Your drive manufacturer should have a utility available for download on their website or you can use a generic utility like SiSoft Sandra:

http://www.sisoftware.net/