Results: Productivity
Our productivity suite is really well-suited to workstations, and it heavily favors high core counts. We see Lenovo’s Core i7-3930K matching the -3930K used in our SBM project at stock speeds.
The $1300 System Builder Marathon machine stumbles in Visual Studio, showing that there's a very real-world benefit to the Hyper-Threading and additional L3 cache featured on Intel's Core i7 processors, even based on the same architecture.
Six-core processors in Lenovo's Erazer and our $2550 SBM PC enjoy a fairly narrow advantage, though it is worth noting that the more complex CPUs operate at lower clock rates and employ less efficient architectures than the quad-core ASRock M8 and $1300 SBM builds, so their win is still impressive.
