Benchmark Results: Content Creation

FX-8150 showing up between Core i7-2600K and Core i5-2500K isn’t a surprise. But Phenom II X6 1100T sliding in ahead of the Zambezi-based chip certainly is. What the heck happened? Well, even though we’re talking about an “eight-core” processor, remember that the floating-point resources are shared. Meanwhile, Thuban has six more-complete cores.

While repeatable, don’t expect the outcome of this benchmark to reflect the rest of our content creation-oriented tests. There are other examples of Thuban outpacing Zambezi, but it doesn't happen often in threaded titles.

This test employs threaded filters, taxing as many cores as we throw at it. Zambezi’s eight integer units capitalize, flying past the Core i5 and Core i7, outright trouncing the six-core Phenom II X6 1100T, too.

Mercury Playback Engine hardware acceleration takes what used to be a nearly hour-long render and compresses it down into less than two minutes thanks to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 580. However, processor performance plays a role as well. AMD’s FX-8150 slots into second place behind Intel’s Core i7-2600K, ahead of the competing Core i5. So far, I'd have to say that FX-8150's threaded performance relative to its price is looking pretty good.

The finish isn’t as picture-perfect for Zambezi in After Effects CS 5.5. Not only do the two Sandy Bridge-based contenders finish ahead, but AMD’s own Phenom II X6 1100T also turns out to be faster. After Effects does leverage many cores. However, FX-8150’s core count isn’t an advantage in this benchmark.

The results in Blender are far more favorable; AMD’s flagship comes in right after the Core i7-2600K. Whereas After Effects wasn’t able to fully utilize available processing resources, Blender pegs all available cores at 100% usage to Zambezi’s benefit.  

SolidWorks’ PhotoView 360 application is also able to fully load all of the processors in today’s review. Consequently, AMD’s FX-8150 processor claims a second-place finish, in between Intel’s Core i7 and i5 CPUs. Not surprisingly, the six-core Phenom II X6 comes in fourth, while the two remaining quad-core models bring up the back.

All told, this is the software class best able to exploit what Zambezi, as a desktop solution, brings to the table. Content creation is notorious for utilizing available compute resources. And, given a price tag that's closer to Core i5-2500K than Core i7-2600K, FX-8150 looks to be in its element.