Benchmark Results: Archiving And Professional Applications
Archiving
One of the most popular archiving tools is WinZip, and while the 15.5 Pro version can take advantage of two CPU cores from the graphical user interface, running a command-line script is still single-threaded.
Zip is one of the key compression standards in use today, which is why we include WinZip, along with WinRAR and 7-Zip. The latter is the most efficient archiving standard, but it’s less common.
It doesn’t come as a surprise that Intel's Sandy Bridge-E-based Core i7-3960X leads the competition in all three metrics. The performance gain is substantial.
Professional Applications
3ds Max scales well with additional cores, and it responds well to the IPC improvements inherent to Sandy Bridge. Therefore, Sandy Bridge-E again takes a win.
The cross-platform 3D content creation tool Blender utilizes all available cores, receives an impressive speed-up from Sandy Bridge's IPC improvements over Nehalem, and consequently enjoys a nice performance jump.
Adobe’s Acrobat X is single-threaded, so it makes sense that the Core i7-3960X and Core i7-2600K would achieve similar performance.
Adobe’s Photoshop CS 5.1 benefits from threading and the Sandy Bridge design yet again, giving Intel's new flagship the top spot in our threaded benchmark.