PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance

Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive

Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.

Clock for clock there's very little advantage compared to Lynnfield, but compared to the i7 760 the Sandy Bridge advantage is no less than 35%.

WinRAR - Archive Creation

Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:

Without Hyper Threading, the Core i5 2400 equals the performance of the Core i7 880. Turn HT on, and this Sandy Bridge part that may end up costing ~$200 is nearly as fast as the $999 Core i7 980X.

3D Rendering Performance Windows 7 Gaming Performance
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  • teohhanhui - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

    Just something like nVidia Optimus? Perhaps Intel could come up with a more elegant solution to the same problem...
  • hnzw rui - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link

    Hmm, based on the roadmap I actually think the i7-2600K will be priced close to the i7-875K. The i7-950 is supposed to drop to $294 next week putting it in the high end Mainstream price range (it'll still be Q3'10 then). Also, all the $500+ processors are in the Performance category (i7-970, $885; i7-960, $562; i7-880, $562).

    If the i7-2600K goes for $340 or thereabouts, I can already see supply shortages due to high demand (and the eventual price gouging that would follow).
  • liyunjiu - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link

    How are the comparisons between NVIDIA low end discrete/mobile graphics?
  • tatertot - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link

    Hey Anand,

    How could you tell that this sample had only 6 execution units active in the GPU vs. the full 12?

    Was it just what this particular SKU is supposed to have, or some CPU-Z type info, or... ?

    thx
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

    Right now all desktop parts have 6 EUs, all mobile parts have 12 EUs. There are no exceptions on the mobile side, there may be exceptions on the desktop side but from the information I have (and the performance I saw) this wasn't one of those exceptions.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • steddy - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

    "all mobile parts have 12 EUs"

    Sweet! Guess the good 'ol GeForce 310m is on the way out.
  • mianmian - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

    The mobile CPU/GPU usually has much lower frequency.
    I guess the 12EU mobile GPU will perform on pair with the desktop 6EU one.
  • IntelUser2000 - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

    That seriously doesn't make sense. Couple of possible scenarios then.

    -Performance isn't EU bound and 2x EUs only bring 10-20%
    -The mobile parts are FAR faster than desktop parts(unlikely)
    -The mobile parts do have 12 EUs, but are clocked low enough to perform like the 6 EU desktop(but why?)
    -There will be specialized versions like the i5 661
  • DanNeely - Sunday, August 29, 2010 - link

    Actually I think it does. Regardless of if they 6 or 12EU's it's still not going be a replacement for any but the bottom tier of GPUs. However adding a budget GPU to a desktop system has a fairly minimal opportunity cost since you're just sticking a card into a slot.

    Adding a replacement GPU in a laptop has a much higher opportunity cost. You're paying in board-space and internal volume even if power gating, etc minimizes the extra power draw doubling the size of the on die GPU will cost less than adding an external GPU that's twice as fast. You also can't upgrade a laptop GPU later on if you decide you need more power.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link

    I spoke too soon, it looks like this may have been a 12 EU part. I've updated the article and will post an update as soon as I'm able to confirm it :)

    Take care,
    Anand

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