The Sandy Bridge Preview

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.