Benchmark Results: Compression Apps
Corel’s recent introduction of WinZip 17 fixes much of what plagued the application’s performance in the past. Finally, it’s able to fully utilize all available processing cores. Moreover, OpenCL support accelerates the compression of files larger than 8 MB. Unfortunately, as it stands, our 1.35 GB test folder includes very few files that large, so turning OpenCL on doesn’t have much of an impact.
The Xeon finishes in first place, confirming that WinZip is now able to completely utilize the resources available to it. Intel’s new Core i7-3970X places second, followed by its predecessor, the -3960X.
Perhaps we’ve been unfairly critical of WinRAR in the past, downplaying the extent to which it’s able to utilize available cores. The fact that we again see Intel’s Xeon E5 finish first, followed by three Sandy Bridge-E-based Core i7s, illustrates that this application does scale beyond four cores.
7-Zip does as well. Even the Xeon E5’s two extra cores clearly make a really big difference. The two-core advantage that a 3.5 GHz Core i7-3970X holds over the Core i7-3770K is equally significant, despite the Ivy Bridge architecture’s superior efficiency.
We remain big fans of the Core i7-3570K for its value. But, at least in this metric, you’ll wait almost a minute more for 1.35 GB to compress on a system with that CPU compared to Intel’s newest Core i7.
