
ABBYY’s FineReader 10, an optical character recognition app, was another requested benchmark. We’ve automated the scanning of a 111-page document for testing—a task that apparently really appreciates parallelism.
The top two finishers are quad-core, Hyper-Threading-enabled CPUs, and third place goes to AMD’s six-core entrant. Fourth belongs to the Core i7-950 (Bloomfield), also able to work on eight threads concurrently.
It takes more than twice as long to get this workload completed on either of the dual-core CPUs compared to Intel’s Core i7-2600K.
Another significant comparison here is between the Core i5-2400 and Phenom II X4 970 (both $185 processors). In case you haven’t been keeping score, the i5 has beaten the Phenom II in every single test. It looks like AMD is going to have to drop prices to make its fastest quad-core chip competitive.

I stopped using the Lame benchmark a while back, but it makes for yet another point of comparison (and a decent indication of performance on a clock-for-clock basis, given its single-threaded operation), so I’m including it here.
The scaling falls in line with what we’d expect. As you get down to the Phenom IIs, bear in mind that the X6 1100T has Turbo CORE, which is able to send it to 3.7 GHz in a workload like Lame.
The only other anomaly would seem to be the Core i7-875K. But its 3.6 GHz Turbo Boost ceiling is undoubtedly the reason it beats the Core i5-655K, despite a sizable base clock disparity.

We phased WinZip out a while ago. But with the release of WinZip 14, Intel got the developer to include AES-NI support. So, we’re putting it back into rotation, alongside the latest versions of WinRAR (no AES-NI support) and 7-Zip (free to use; includes AES-NI).
If you didn’t know any better, you’d think we duplicated the charts for Lame and WinZip. Indeed, it looks like the fine folks at WinZip still haven’t optimized for threading, and so performance is based almost exclusively on IPC throughput and clock rate, rather than parallelism. Boooring.

Thanks to all of our readers who suggested adopting WinRAR 4.00 and 7-Zip 9.20—we’ve upgraded both utilities to the latest versions.
While the results of our WinRAR compression routine don’t look significantly different than the WinZip charts, you will notice that the dual-core Core i5-655K gets knocked down to last place and the Core i3-2100 falls behind the Core i7-950 and Core i7-875K.
Unfortunately for AMD, the six-core 1100T and four-core 970 don’t move up in the standings, despite the threading optimizations in WinRAR. We’re not sure if this is a development issue or not, but there’s a pretty clear tendency toward the new Sandy Bridge processors here.

Rather than run the same set of files through a third compression utility, we took advantage of 7-Zip’s built-in ability to measure each platform’s performance in millions of instructions per second.
Parallelism really benefits the 7-Zip metric, which we set to take advantage of all available threads on each CPU.
- Core i7-2600K, Core i5-2500K, Core i5-2400, And Core i3-2100 Reviewed
- Inside Of Sandy Bridge: Cores And Cache
- The System Agent And Turbo Boost 2.0
- Sandy Bridge’s Secret Weapon: Quick Sync
- Quick Sync Vs. APP Vs. CUDA
- Blu-ray Playback And Video Performance
- HD Graphics On The Desktop: Intel Trips Up
- Two New Platforms, More On The Way
- Overclocking: Sandy Bridge Changes The Game
- Meet Intel’s Second-Gen Core CPUs
- Hardware Setup
- Benchmark Results: PCMark Vantage
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark11
- Benchmark Results: SiSoftware Sandra 2011
- Benchmark Results: Content Creation
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Media Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Metro 2033 (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: F1 2010 (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: Aliens Vs. Predator (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: Power Consumption
- Conclusion
Just this.
i think the author's saying he's a sexually active cyberphile
Fixed, thanks Money!
i think the author's saying he's a sexually active cyberphile
Just this.
Everytime there's a new contest, I see this line. =(
I don't know how AMD's going to fare but i hope their new architecture will at least compete with these CPU's, because for a few years now AMD has been at least a generation worth of speed behind Intel.
Also Intel's IGP's are finally gaining some ground in the games department.
I really wish this weren't the case fakie--and I'm very sorry it is. We're unfortunately subject to the will of the finance folks and the government, who make it hard to give things away without significant tax ramifications. I know that's of little consolation, but that's the reason
Best,
Chris
I believe that says it all. Sorry, Intel, your new architecture may be excellent, but unless the i3-2100 series outperforms anything AMD can offer at the same price range WHILE OVERCLOCKED, you will see none of my desktop dollars.
That is all.
As for overclocking, well it seems a bit odd in the way it is being implemented. But for $216, I can't complain too much about a quad-core with a base clock of 3.3 GHz. Some enthusiasts won't like the limited overclocking features, but others will welcome the simplified approach.
I will be building my brother a new gaming computer for graduation this summer and now I have another viable option to look at. I had planned on going with a P55 + i5 760, but now I will need to consider the P67 + i5 2500K.
Waiting on bulldozer...
Other than that its a great article, and I'm drooling over QuickSync!
QuickSync definitely looks interesting.
This is all very nice, but I'll keep my bclk control for now and maybe move up when I get out of college in seven months and the tech is set in stone and dropping in price a little.
Not a bad chip, and I'm excited to see where they go with it. =]
These things are as fast as the i7 980X and in some cases they're even faster!