Application Benchmarks: Productivity
Everybody has a virus scanner, or at least they should. How well do these processors handle an AVG scan?
This has always puzzled me, and I'm considering exploring it for a more in-depth explanation. Apparently, AVG isn't strongly affected by clock speed or cache;, it only wants to work across multiple cores. The difference between 2.9 GHz or 3.77 GHz on the Athlon II X3 435 is surprisingly negligible.
These compression utilities show some really interesting results. This is the first application we're seeing that seems to really utilize the shared L3 cache. WinRAR even demonstrates better performance with the Phenom II X3 720 at stock speed compared to the Athlon II X3 435 overclocked to 3.77 GHz. There is also significant threading optimizations rolled into the latest version of WinRAR, and despite its cache deficit, the Athlon II X4 620 performs closely to the Phenom II X2 550.
While WinZip also appears to utilize cache to a small degree, its results are more influenced by clock rate, since the app isn't written to take advantage of multiple processing cores.
