Dissecting the PCMark®05 Benchmark and Assessing Performance Scaling

One quick and fairly accurate way to assess the performance of a computer system and its components is to run the popular PCMarkreg05 (Niemela, 2005) benchmark. We analyze the performance scaling of the PCMarkreg05 CPU test suite with higher CPU frequencies and number of logical processors and/or CPU cores, and dissect this suite and characterize its workload in an attempt to assess performance scaling, and to extract performance data useful to guide processor design enhancements. The results indicate that this benchmark is suitable for distinguishing the performance of multi-core processors with up to 4 hardware threads. On multithreaded tests, score gains due to doubling the CPUs exceeded score gains due to increasing the frequency of one CPU core by 1GHz