Guest post by Real World Technologies has posted a code level dissection of the Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 and an AMD Athlon FX-62. While rather dated, the two processors were state of the art in 2006, the article does an excellent job of detailing why the processors behave the way they do. Many publications will say, “Game X runs better on processor Z, so processor Z wins”, but that does not tell the reader why. This Real World Technologies article, on the other hand, explains why. For instance, they used the game Prey to test the CPUs and found “Prey tends to favor more complex x86 instructions that likely either use 3 inputs, or have 2 output.”
If you’re wondering why the article is so dated, Dave Kanter explains in The Tech Report’s comments section. “Actually, I’m a little embarrassed at how long it took to do this, but it’s one of those things that takes a lot of effort and we had to restart dozens of times. David”