Performance: Applications
The current AVG AntiVirus version 8.0.134 has been optimized to take advantage of up to four processing cores, and the optimizations show their effect: AMD’s Phenom e9350 is faster when you want it to search files for viruses. Our set of test data, which consists of a few hundred megabytes of RAR and Zip files, took seven minutes and 25 seconds on the Core 2 Duo E8500, but only five minutes and 53 seconds on the Phenom X4 e9350.
There is no clear winner in Cinema 4D. Obviously, Intel’s dual core 3.16 GHz processor provides almost exactly the same performance as the four core 2.0 GHz AMD quad core. This is a perfect example to show that there are two ways of creating performance: via faster clock speeds or via an increased core count.
Fritz 11 is the latest version of the popular chess tool; we like this program, as it has been heavily optimized to utilize up to eight cores. As a result, AMD’s Phenom X4 e9350 at 2.0 GHz is faster than the Core 2 Duo E8500 with half the core count running at 3.16 GHz. However, Intel comes pretty close to the e9350 performance, despite clock speed that is only 58% faster. Clearly, Intel’s core microarchitecture is doing a great job.
WinRAR is the utility to compress and deflate RAR archives. Both the AMD quad core and Intel’s dual core package our set of test files into a RAR archive using maximum compression in almost the same time. The AMD quad core is slightly faster, though.
We decided to add WinZIP 11 to our benchmarking suite. In contrast to WinRAR, the competing file compression tool has not received any optimizations for multi-core processors, so the dual core Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 takes about half the processing time of the Phenom X4. If you scroll up and look at how close the processing time gets in WinRAR, it becomes very obvious that software developers should no longer wait before optimizing for multi-core processors. Most people already purchase dual-core systems, and 2009 will be the year when quad cores finally hit the mainstream.
Adobe’s Photoshop CS3 is thread-optimized, but it only scales well with up to two cores—the four-core Phenom X4 e9350 could do much better, if only the software allowed it. Again, Intel wins thanks to SSE4 optimizations by Adobe, and its superior architecture when it comes to performance per clock.
"The Mainconcept 1.5.1 benchmark converts MPEG2 FullHD video into the H.264 format. Although the benchmark scales well with as many as eight cores—we used an Intel Skulltrail system to try this—the 2.0 GHz quad core isn’t enough to beat Intel’s 3.16 GHz dual core."
According to the graph you show us, it is...
Do you even have an editor anymore? This article is yet another nail in toms coffin. The graphs are wrong (two items on each graph and you still manage to swap them over), the words are wrong (eg 3.16 quad!!!) and worse still the article is pointless.
Here's another apples to oranges for you:
I own a motorbike and a car, both do 40mpg and both cost the same. But wait the car has more seats AND more wheels, its safer in an accident too so it must be better than the bike. oh no did i forget to look at the bikes good points never mind.
And why choose the low power version, you could have used a cheaper high power version and underclocked/undervolted to reduce power OR accept the fact that four cores should use more power than two but seeing as you didn't want to show the quad win anything i guess you can't accept that.
I guess whoever is in charge these days is only concerned with ad revenue not content or integrety
"Supreme Commander shows the same results: it runs much faster on the Intel dual core than it does on AMD’s quad core. Since the performance difference is 80%, the clock speed difference alone isn’t enough to account for the tremendous difference."
Wrong again. According to graph, Phenom is faster than C2D, not the other way around.
This artical is a little to bias to Intel for my liking. When applications that do support 4 cores are tested and unsuprisingly the AMD chip wins, they dont praise it, they just praise the intel chip instead for coming a close 2nd. While all the applications that dont support 4 cores get praise for Intel for winning and not to AMD for coming second.
The whole artical makes no sence about what it does compare.
My conclusion for the artical the E8500 3.16 GHz wins on all single/double core applications but when 4 cores are used the AMD Phenom X4 e9350 2.0 GHz wins. Which is what we should expect anyway.
This article is interesting from the standpoint of software, the main thing I see from this is just how little use applications currently make of extra cores.
Nehalem...sorry Core i7...yes, yes that's much better...will surely have an impact on applications use of multithreading. Or will it? with 'turbo-mode' perhaps there is no need for software to use those extra cores.
Annoyingly left out was the overclocking performance of these two processors. As we know Intel's current chips annihilate the competition in overclockability providing extra Hertz for just a few hours time. These E8500 are easily hitting 4GHz I do tend to wonder if the advantage the AMD had in some tests wouldnt be eliminated when both chips were fully OC'd.
What i was interesting in is,
having the benchmarks run with a current antivirus software "allways on", as it should, at least, be users default configuration.
thanx
Tom's, please replace your eeditor with any small child. I could have seen the mistakes here when I was 9.
Tom's, please replace your eeditor with any small child. I could have seen the mistakes here when I was 9.
However, I did make a typo when making that comment
A fast dual-core is best for games
An energy-efficient quad is good for use as a home/media server
^ I did that without looking at the article. Am I right? Hang on... yep, pretty much.
How'd I manage that? Well, it ain't cuz i'm psychic, that's for sure. It's because WE KNEW ALL THIS ALREADY TOM!
Games are more responsive to raw power and are less heavily threaded - most are threaded for dual-core, but as of yet relatively few can make good use of a massively multicore platform (except well-coded PS3 games, and that's a different subject entirely!). Modern applications, especially graphical, media (encoders!) and file-based (server/AV) are designed to split and combine threads on-the-fly and with Vista in tow really need a quad to crunch them efficiently in the background.
So what was the point of this article again exactly? Telling us what's very common knowledge?
I was hoping u did abit more the real workstation apps. particularly Virtualization. And running on Vista 64 bit.
For applications that are dependent on core speed, the AMD does not do so bad. Let's also remember that the AMD chip is being used in a chipset that offers HD playback and half-decent 3D game support..the same cannot be said for Intel-based chipsests. I would also go with AMD for a cheap, fast server..where the architecture comes into it's own (especially core-to-core and memory performance).
That's because Intel doesn't have a native quad core. It's also the reason why some of the world's fastest super-computers rely on AMD hardware. Intel may have caught up with AMD in the desktop sector (bar chipsets and graphics cards), but the server/cluster/super-computer sectors use AMD for a reason. The people knocking AMD should do well to remember that, perhaps.
you guys are so boring! i hate this website now all you dorks that are into computers need to get a life, play some basketball, and listen to some rock n roll like i am right now! im a seventh grader that is more cool than all of you put together!