London, UK, December 11, 2008 - Software has announced the availability of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for SiSoftware Sandra 2009, the latest version of its award-winning utility.

The focus of this service release has been improved support, compatibility and reliability rather than new features. We have been working closely with more hardware vendors than before to be able to bring greater direct support of an increased market share of commodity and server technologies.

At SiSoftware from version to version we focus four key areas of software development to make sure we give our users the best software experience. Quite simply our four drivers are:

• Inclusion of new technologies that ensure our tools remain current.
• Increased hardware and software support for existing modules.
• Improving the user interface to make it a richer easier user experience.
• Filling gaps in the product line in response to our customers’ needs.

Looking at these in more detail:

1. This version introduces additional support in the graphics performance space. Not only including support for DirectX (9/10), SiSoftware has added two GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) benchmarks, that focus on this new computing processing space. Please see the GPGPU Press Release.

Cryptography has become an important part of our digital life: it allows us to conduct safe transactions online, certify programs and services, keep our data secure and much more. This version adds dedicated benchmarks that measure cryptographic performance. Please see the Crypto Press Release.

2.Since last year much new hardware has been released and the SiSoftware team continue to work on including support for new hardware and software in the latest version.

3. Our feedback has told us that you all have your favourite modules, the tests you are interested in the ones you run daily or weekly, well now we offer the ability to use the favourites tab in the software to organise the tools you use better. We have also further improved the interface to add headings to make it clearer to see the module groups.

4. Responding to customers’ needs to have a rapid portable version of Sandra that does not need installing and can just as easily run from CD, we introduce Sandra Engineer PLUS, offering the same operating system support as Sandra Engineer, just this version supplied on a credit card style mini-CD that can live in your pocket or wallet, does not require installation to aid the technician access to a wealth of information in the tried and tested Sandra format.

With each release, we add new support and compatibility for the latest hardware, architectures and operating systems, and this is no exception. SiSoftware continues to work with hardware vendors to ensure the best support for new emerging hardware.

New modules

Graphics (GPGPU) Processing: Benchmark the graphics performance of the graphics processors (GPGPUs). Such operations are used by specialised software, e.g. scientific software, image manipulation, video decoders/encoders, games that make GPU performance pretty important.

Graphics (GPGPU) Bandwidth: Benchmark the bandwidth of the memory of the graphics processors (GPGPUs) and the bandwidth of the bus that connects them to your computer. The speed at which the data can be sent to the GPGPUs, internally processed and the results sent back is as important as the processing power of the GPGPUs.

Video (GFX) Rendering: Benchmark the graphics performance of the video adapters (GFXs). Shows how your graphics processors handle rendering in comparison to other typical graphics processors. Such operations are used by all graphics software, image manipulation, video decoders/encoders, games and modern operating systems.

Video (GFX) Memory: Benchmark the bandwidth of the memory of the video adapters (GFXs) and the bandwidth of the bus that connects them to your computer.

Cryptographic Performance: Benchmark the cryptographic performance of modern processors that support hardware cryptographic engines. The most common algorithms, AES (AES128, AES256) for encryption/decryption and SHA (SHA1, SHA256) for hashing are supported.

For more infomation on this release, see the official press-release.

For more information on the commercial versions of Sandra or to purchase, please visit this page.