Benchmark Results: Productivity

Incremental steps from the Core i7-2600K to the Core i7-990X to Intel’s upcoming Core i7-3960X tell us that ABBYY is not only optimized for at least six threads, but also that it benefits from Sandy Bridge’s architectural improvements.

We know that Lame is a single-threaded metric. So, in this case, the Core i7-3960X’s 3.9 GHz maximum Turbo Boost setting is what allows it to slide past the Core i7-2600K’s 3.8 GHz ceiling.

The -990X hits 3.73 GHz, but it doesn’t include the IPC-oriented improvements to Sandy Bridge, so it trails behind more significantly than its operating frequency might indicate.

WinZip is also single-threaded. But this time the Core i7-3960X’s minor clock rate advantage doesn’t hand it the victory automatically. As we saw when we isolated clock rate in iTunes and Lame, Sandy Bridge-E does appear to give up some performance to Sandy Bridge, and that’s reflected in WinZip 14.

Swap over to a threaded app like WinRAR, though, and Core i7-3960X reasserts itself by outpacing the Core i7-990X and Core i7-2600K.

The same goes for 7-Zip, another threaded application.