Benchmark Results: Productivity
Today marks the first time I’ve ever seen a single-processor system break under the one-minute threshold in our ABBYY FineReader 10 test. This application utilizes as many cores as you throw at it, allowing the Xeon E5-2687W to wrap up while AMD’s “eight-core” FX-8150 is still only halfway done.
Intel’s Core i7-3970X finishes in second, but is only three seconds faster than Core i7-3930K, which sells for less than $600.
Printing a PowerPoint document to PDF is another single-threaded workload. So, the higher IPC throughput of Intel’s Ivy Bridge architecture prevails. It’s only by the implementation of Turbo Boost that the Core i7-3970X accelerates to 4 GHz, beating Intel’s Core i7-3470, which is limited to 3.6 GHz.
In sharp contrast, our Visual Studio 2010 benchmark is very well threaded. It actually tends to take longer than any other test in our suite. On a Phenom II X4 980, for instance, compiling Google Chrome is an almost 40-minute process.
If you’re lucky enough to own a Xeon E5-2687W, however, the whole job finishes in just over 14 minutes. A Core i7-3970X makes you wait a couple of minutes longer, but once you step into the world of LGA 1155-based quad-core CPUs, performance really starts to drop off.
The latest version of the German chess program Fritz puts Intel’s Xeon E5 to good use, more than doubling the number of kilonodes/second AMD’s FX-8150 achieves.
