Benchmark Results: Media And Transcoding
iTunes continues serving one interesting purpose: demonstrating the merits of high clock rates. The 4.66 GHz Core i5 actually finishes our workload first. Because iTunes isn’t threaded, it gains nothing from the chips with four or six cores. As such, it’s a little surprising to see the Phenom II X4 and X6 with nine seconds separating them. More often than not, though, both 4 GHz parts should be on equal footing in single-threaded titles at the same frequency.
We’ve upgraded to the newest version of MainConcept, which shows the Core i7-875K at 4.13 GHz in first place with AMD’s Phenom II X6 1090T close behind. The Phenom II X4 965 takes third, simply outclassing Intel’s Core i5-655K at 4.66 GHz.
HandBrake exploits parallelism, and the six-core Phenom II X6 1090T offers more of it than the quad-core Core i7-875K, despite Hyper-Threading’s influence. Similarly, the quad-core Phenom II X4 965 is faster than the Core i5-655K.
Though DivX is well-threaded, Intel reverses the trend seen previously and takes a lead versus the Phenom II X4 and X6 with the Core i5 and Core i7, respectively. Xvid is not well-threaded, so it’s no surprise to see the higher-clocked Intel processors finishing our benchmark workload first and second.
