Video Transcoding Performance

x264 HD 3.03 Benchmark

Graysky's x264 HD test uses x264 to encode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.

x264 HD Benchmark - 1st pass - v3.03

x264 HD Benchmark - 2nd pass - v3.03

In the second pass of our x264 test we see a nearly 14% increase over the 2600K. Once again, there's no replacement for more cores in these types of workloads but delivering better performance in a lower TDP than last year's quad-core is great for more thermally conscious desktops.

Software Development Performance

Compile Chromium Test

You guys asked for it and finally I have something I feel is a good software build test. Using Visual Studio 2008 I'm compiling Chromium. It's a pretty huge project that takes over forty minutes to compile from the command line on a Core i3 2100. But the results are repeatable and the compile process will stress all 12 threads at 100% for almost the entire time on a 980X so it works for me.

Build Chromium Project - Visual Studio 2008

Ivy Bridge shows more traditional gains in our VS2008 benchmark - performance moves forward here by a few percent, but nothing significant. We are seeing a bit of a compressed dynamic range here for this particular compiler workload, it's quite possible that other bottlenecks are beginning to creep in as we get even faster microarchitectures.

Content Creation Performance Compression & Encryption Performance
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  • jjj - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    CPU perf pretty much as expected,GPU perf somewhat dissapointing ,i thought they'll at least aim to match Llano but i guess it is ok for 1MP laptops screens if mobile parts perform close enough (and a couple of big ifs when it comes to image quality and drivers).
    Any opinions yet about QuickSync encoding quality?
  • wifiwolf - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    And we should remark that's comparing 2600 with 3700 which have different cpu too.
    Other benchmarks had significantly better results on 3700 than 2600.

    So Anand, how you know that difference is not attributable to the CPU and not to some gpu improvement?
  • IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    You are not being serious, are you? The CPU gets 10% in CPU sensitive benchmarks and GPU gained 40-60%. Even taking out 10%, its still 30-50%, which btw isn't true as games aren't very sensitive to CPU changes as applications do.
  • wifiwolf - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    Look at crisys or metro benchmarks and tell me where you find that improvement, at least more than what you find in cpu difference.
  • mosu - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    I've tried it on some HD clips at a local TV station and on a big screen it really sucked.It's way behind AMD.We used aHP EliteBook 8460P laptop.
  • Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    At least AMD's products are HD capable.
  • dr/owned - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link

    My 5 year old laptop with a shared ram gpu is "HD capable". GTFO noob.
  • Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Billions in R&D, double the MSRP, half the power and yet it still can't play Crysis better than Llano, which will be replaced by Trinity in a few weeks. What a crying shame.
  • travbrad - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link

    Not playing Crysis sounds like a good thing to me.
  • tipoo - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Source or gtfo. Apple got the stock HD 3000, why would this be different?

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