Results: Media Encoding
TotalCode Studio (formerly MainConcept) doesn’t seem to fully utilize the Xeon E5-2697 V2. The Ivy Bridge-EP-based chip is on par with the previous-gen Xeon E5-2687W.
Scaling is pretty minor in our HandBrake transcode as well.
We could have guessed the outcome in iTunes based on our Adobe Acrobat file creation test in PowerPoint. This high-end Xeon necessarily runs at lower clock rates, so in a single-threaded benchmark, it’s at a severe disadvantage compared to more mainstream CPUs.
The same story applies to LAME. In choosing the Xeon E5-2697 V2, you’re accepting lower performance in apps not optimized for threading, assuming that they’re not particularly taxing in the first place, and, in return, getting a massive boost in software able to utilize the processor’s 12 Hyper-Threaded cores.