Media Encoding Performance with DivX 6.4, WME9, Quicktime and iTunes

With its Core architecture Intel made significant improvements to SSE performance, which we see in the real world here with our DivX encoding test. AMD will be significantly improving its SSE performance with its Barcelona core due out next year, but until then not even four cores will paint a decent picture.

General Performance - Encoding  

Windows Media Encoder with Advanced Profile encoding performance is far closer, with Intel taking the lead by 7% at the top. Performance is quite competitive, but you have to deal with a more expensive platform and as you will soon see, much greater power consumption.

General Performance - Encoding  

Both Quicktime and iTunes get no real improvement from four cores over two so these final encoding tests mainly boil down to a performance comparison between dual core CPUs:

General Performance - Encoding

General Performance - Encoding  

3D Rendering Performance using 3dsmax 8 & CineBench 9.5 Gaming Performance with Quake 4 and Oblivion
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  • BikeDude - Tuesday, December 5, 2006 - link

    Could the reason be that 1GB per memory node is simply too little?

    On a configuration like this, you'll easily see one of the nodes with only 256MB or so left...

    So, put in some more memory! At this point 32-bit XP will be limiting, even for 32-bit apps. (XP won't address more than 2^32 Bytes, some of this will be masked by PCI and PCIe devices, and additionally each process only has a 2GB address space for code&data unless you upgrade to 64-bit Windows) Also be aware that nVidia ForceWare 80.00 and newer lost PAE support. You'll experience crashes and non-working games if combined with a PAE aware 32-bit OS (such as Win2003). ForceWare 79.11 works fine though.

    (BTW: MSFT added NUMA support in XP SP2)
  • Kiijibari - Saturday, December 2, 2006 - link

    Hi Ananand,

    sounds credible, because there is some extra cache snooping traffic going on, anyways, please keep us posted if there is a new BIOS version available, and if it would "do" something :)

    Windows schweduler differences between XP and VISTA would be interesting, too.
    So far there were only Win32 XP vs. Win Vista64 comparisions, not possible to draw a fair conclusion with that data.

    Thanks a lot

    Kiijibari
  • mino - Friday, December 1, 2006 - link

    One important question:

    Are those new FX-7x CPU identical or is there some differentiation employed ???
  • Kiijibari - Saturday, December 2, 2006 - link

    identical to what ?

    If you meant Socket-F Opterons, then yes, they are identical, if the BIOS allows it, then normal Opterons should be able to run in 4x4 boards, too.

    cheers

    Kiijibari
  • mino - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link

    Thanks that info(if correct) pretty much clears the FUD.
  • Griswold - Saturday, December 2, 2006 - link

    How so? The 2P+ Opteron IMC wants buffered RAM, while these FX types do not. I dont think a simple BIOS hack can circumvent that.
  • Kiijibari - Saturday, December 2, 2006 - link

    *gasp*

    Du you really think AMD engineers, tests, validate, etc. a CPU for a niche market ??
    There are maybe only a few thousand 4x4 CPUs, that are sold worldwide per month ... it would be economical ridiculous.

    But if you dont know anything about business, maybe that will convince you:

    http://www.aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?i...">http://www.aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?i...

    cheers

    Kiijibari

  • lollichop - Sunday, February 26, 2017 - link

    All idiots talking about old CPUs here :D Fast forward 11 years, Ryzen will be out in a week's time.

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