Application: WinRAR, Lame MP3 and DivX
The Prescott 3.4 GHz processor makes a 13 second improvement over the Northwood core, so we are beginning to see the advantages of the additional core changes mentioned on the first page of the review. The newly released FX-53 from AMD is taking a strong lead, 34 seconds, over the best from Intel.
The LAME MP3 encoder tests encoding WAV files into MP3 at 320 kbps. This benchmark is one of the worst for the Prescott core, as we see it lost by 20 seconds to the Northwood at 3.4 GHz. However, for Intel, they do in fact come out ahead of the best from AMD here, beating the FX-53 by 6 seconds.
The DivX encoding test shows a little better story for the Prescott core. While it does come out slightly slower than the Northwood, I found out too late for publication that there is a new revision of DivX that takes advantage of the SSE3 instruction set found only in the Prescott cores. The AMD FX and 64 processors are still able to show the performance lead, in this revision. In future tests, we’ll be showing the latest revision of DivX encoding — our apologies.
