MS ICE, Euler 3D, WME 64, and Power Consumption
Microsoft ICEThis free image compositing application is multi-core aware. Or at least they say.
It is about time to retire this benchmark, as the differences in results are almost completely random. Either that or I need to create a much larger sample image to soak up the horsepower of these new CPUs.
Euler 3D
This benchmark is based on a scientific application which simulates airflow over an airfoil. I’m guessing that this was compiled using one of the Intel compilers… because AMD invariably performs much worse than what comparable Intel processors do. Perhaps this will change after all of the legal wrangling that has surrounded Intel last year? I doubt it.
The extra cache on the X2 555 gave it a huge leg up over the rest of the Athlon IIs. While not enough to make a dual core outperform a triple core, it was a good 62 seconds faster than the slightly slower clocked Athlon II X2 255. More cores are always better when increasing the number of threads, but the Intel E8500 performs within 25 seconds on two cores as the Athlon II X4 635 running on all four cores.
Windows Media Encoder 64
This free encoder utilizes multiple threads and 64 bit processing to speed up transcoding and encoding. In this test I transcode a 1080p WMV file to a 640p 1 Mbps VBR file. The time to complete this was recorded.
The more cores thrown at a problem, the faster it gets done.
Power Consumption
I measured power consumption at the wall, but only with the computer plugged in. The monitor is not contributing to the power consumption. I let the system sit for 10 minutes and then recorded idle power consumption. I then ran Cinebench R10 under the max CPU test, which runs as many cores as are present.
All of the results are very, very close to each other. The most efficient is obviously the Athlon II X2 255. The Phenom II X2 555 does not have as good of idle power, but that is primarily because of the large L3 cache that it contains. Once things get dialed up, then we see the X4 chip eat a lot more electricity, while the X2 255 is still leading in efficiency. Still, with the differing number of cores we are seeing in these tests, compared to their relative clockspeeds, it is interesting to see the results all being as close as they are.
