Results: Media Encoding
It's clear from the pages of benchmarks we just ran that Richland's graphics subsystem has little trouble making quick work of Intel's HD Graphics 2500 engine. And we can be fairly certain from Angelini's evaluation of the Core i7-4770K that AMD's A10-6800K is going to be faster than HD Graphics 4000 and even HD Graphics 4600, too. But what happens when we shift away from the 3D applications and focus more intently on x86 apps? We'll start with a couple of single-threaded audio encoding titles.
iTunes is notoriously single-threaded, giving Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture a notable advantage. The A10-6800K manages to improve on AMD's A10-5800K, but it can't come close to the Core i3.
The same applies to LAME, another single-threaded audio encoding title.
HandBrake exploits multi-core architectures well, yielding an advantage to AMD's Piledriver design. Two Hyper-Threaded Ivy Bridge cores simply cannot keep up.
As the Lame results mirror iTunes, so does TotalCode Studio emulate the outcome of HandBrake. In general, software-based video encoding workloads favor the CPUs with more cores to work in parallel. It's true that AMD's Piledriver modules do share certain resources. However, Hyper-Threading isn't enough to keep Intel's efficient dual-core configuration ahead.
We should also note that these are software-based video encoders. A build of HandBrake recently emerged with optimizations for OpenCL and Intel's Quick Sync technology. Factoring in hardware acceleration affects performance and quality, so keep that in mind when you start looking at encode jobs that exploit other resources.
