The two ScienceMark tests above, which are the Primordia and Molecular Dynamics tests, obviously do not make full use of quad-core processors, as the dual-core Core 2 Duo E8400 delivered the best results by far. The Core 2 Quad Q6600 produced similar performance to that of the Phenom 9500 and 9600 processors. Interestingly, the Athlon64 X2 5200+ was also quite fast as it managed to outperform the Q6600!

The next two ScienceMark tests that we ran, being STREAM and BLAS/FLOPs, do not seem to be swayed by either multiple cores or clock frequency. While the Core 2 Duo E8400 does well in the BLAS/FLOPs test, it was not as impressive for the STREAM test. What we did notice is that the Phenom processors delivered solid performance in both tests.