Time to shine - let's load up them cores
| WAV encoding of 701MB file | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Core i7 965 EE | Intel Core i7 920 | AMD Phenom X4 9950 BE | Intel C2E QX6800 | Intel C2E QX9770 | Intel C2Q Q9450 | Intel Core i7 940 |
| 88.78 | 104.82 | 142.2 | 104.6 | 87.77 | 105.38 | 96.6 |
There's nothing to be gained with respect to dual-threaded WAV encoding when it's run as a single-instance test. Here, Core i7's improvements don't really matter one bit, and that will be a common theme if your application-set tends to be run in isolation and unable to take advantage of the architecture's benefits.
| DivX 6.8.3 + LAME encoding, enhanced multithreading on | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Core i7 965 EE | Intel Core i7 920 | AMD Phenom X4 9950 BE | Intel C2E QX6800 | Intel C2E QX9770 | Intel C2Q Q9450 | Intel Core i7 940 |
| 179.55 | 214.1 | 333 | 253.86 | 220.89 | 263.62 | 196.1 |
But even the slowest and cheapest Core i7 is faster than the £850 QX9770 in our multi-core-threaded DivX test. It shows just how much extra performance is available if the workload is just right.
AMD's Phenom X4 9950 BE is considerably slower, of course, but it costs only £120.
| Pov-ray 3.7.0 beta 25a - 64-bit | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Core i7 965 EE | Intel Core i7 920 | AMD Phenom X4 9950 BE | Intel C2E QX6800 | Intel C2E QX9770 | Intel C2Q Q9450 | Intel Core i7 940 |
| 3951.9 | 3311.15 | 1727.11 | 2354.88 | 2625.32 | 2186.66 | 3631.18 |
| CINEBENCH R10 64-bit - multi-CPU render | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Core i7 965 EE | Intel Core i7 920 | AMD Phenom X4 9950 BE | Intel C2E QX6800 | Intel C2E QX9770 | Intel C2Q Q9450 | Intel Core i7 940 |
| 18334 | 15448 | 9872 | 11706 | 14059 | 11709 | 16677 |
Professional software tends to be multi-threaded and optimised for multi-core processors. As such, the gains in our POV-ray and CINEBENCH tests are nothing short of excellent - the Core i7 920 making the previous champion, Core 2 QX9770, look decidedly slow.
| WinRAR 3.80 compression of 1.2GB file | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Core i7 965 EE | Intel Core i7 920 | AMD Phenom X4 9950 BE | Intel C2E QX6800 | Intel C2E QX9770 | Intel C2Q Q9450 | Intel Core i7 940 |
| 272 | 301 | 514 | 538 | 422 | 447 | 287 |
And that's brought to bear when using multi-threaded WinRar to wrap up a 1.2GB file.
