Results: Cinebench R11.5, 7-Zip, and WME9 x64
Cinebench R11.5The latest iteration of Cinebench uses a new and more efficient tiling method of rendering when dealing with multiple cores. It is well supported by both Intel and AMD CPUs, and it is viewed as a fairly balanced and non-biased benchmark. Since the VIA Nano DC is a new processor, and from a lesser regarded manufacturer, I am curious if Cinebench R11.5 is fully optimized for use with the Nano DC.
The Nano DC does not have a great showing here. It is odd, as Sandra reports floating point performance to be quite on par with the AMD units at the same clockspeed. One would expect the CPUs to be a lot closer together in terms of performance in such an application. If Cinebench also has a large integer based component, as well as memory bandwidth (which is a big consideration), then the Nano DC will obviously not fare well here. And it didn’t.
7-Zip
The free compression program 7-Zip comes with a nice internal benchmark that is multi-threaded. Users can choose the size of definition file (32 MB in my case), as well as how many threads are active. This reports results in MIPS, and is very nicely repeatable.
Interestingly enough, the Nano DC sits behind the X2 260U by about the same amount as in Cinebench R11.5. There is a large integer component with compression software, and we can see the same type of difference when looking at the Sandra Dhrystone results.
Windows Media Encoder x64
This trustworthy, multi-threaded media encoder/transcoder is a staple of the benchmark work. I took a 250 MB 1080p video clip and encoded it to 1 mb VBR (480P). Final file size for the video is 42 MB.
Well, better have a few things to do while encoding on Nano. We see the same performance delta with WME 9 as with the previous computationally intensive benchmarks. It is easy to be spoiled by the affordable triple and quad core processors on the desktop now when it comes to video encoding and transcoding.
