Video and sound encoding
The video and sound encoding tests show that applications in this area are far from optimised for multi-core processors. For example, when turning raw audio data into MP3 files, the Windows version of iTunes uses only two threads, so quad-core CPUs offer no speed advantage over dual-core alternatives. The Mac version, by contrast, uses four arithmetic and logic units.
The story is very different when it comes to the video encoding tool Cyberlink PowerProducer. Because this software supports the Nehalem architecture's two threads per core, the 2.66GHz Core i7 920 delivers better performance than the faster-clocked 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9775, which also has four cores but only runs one thread per core.
Video/sound encoding tests (seconds): shorter bars are better.
Rendering performance
In the rendering tests, the Core i7 processsors deliver particularly impressive results with Povray. Here, even the Core i7 920 clocked at 2.66GHz performs better than the 3.2GHz quad-core QX9775 without hyperthreading. With the 32-bit version of Cinebench R10, there's little difference between the two chips, but the Core i7 920 edges ahead when running the 64-bit version.
Video/sound encoding tests (seconds): shorter bars are better.
Rendering performance tests: longer bars are better.
Internet performance: Javascript tests
As web sites become more complex, using Web 2.0 and AJAX applications, browsers need to deal with increasingly tricky tasks, which makes CPU performance more important. However, in our tests with Firefox 3.1 beta 1 it's clear that JavaScript does not benefit from the additional computing abilities of Intel's new Core i7 processors.
JavaScript/SunSpider tests (milliseconds): shorter bars are better.
13%
1%
The charts that accompany this article are difficult to read because the order of the bars and the legends keep changing. What's up with that?