Movie Maker 2.1, OCR, WAV encoding
More multi-threaded goodness is to be found in Microsoft's Movie Maker 2.1, which ships with Windows XP SP2. The test here is to encode 417MB of DV footage into high-quality WMV. The resulting file is a more palatable 24MB, yet keeps the original's 720x480 resolution. It's like comparing a true dual-CPU system against regular systems, which essentially is what the Pentium XE 840 is.
More of this quad-threaded application performance in ABBYY 7.0's background optical character recognition program.
Here's a 701MB single WAV file encoded into 128KB/s MP3 format using LAME 3.97a and an Intel compiler that benefits both AMD and Intel CPUs' performance when compared against a reference Microsoft compiler. The point of interest here is that the test is run without enabling the compiler to use Hyper-Threading support.
The same test with HT enabled. These two results show just how precarious it is to form an opinion on relative benchmark performance without taking optimisations into account. The benchmark results thus far fall into two groups. Applications that don't benefit from having 4 threads executed in parallel are indifferent to the XE 840's qualities. Those that do, and are shown above, absolutely fly. It's horses for courses.
