Benchmark Results: Productivity
ABBYY’s FineReader 10, an optical character recognition app, was another requested benchmark. We’ve automated the scanning of a 111-page document for testing—a task that apparently really appreciates parallelism.
Both Core i7 Extreme Editions cruise past the Core i7-2600K in our OCR workload. The difference isn’t earth-shattering or anything. But when you consider the fastest chip in our Sandy Bridge launch coverage was the -2600K, two faster CPUs are definitely newsworthy.
Lame is a single-threaded test, which means the Core 7-2600K accelerates up to 3.8 GHz. Add to that significant per-clock improvements in Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture and you have an explanation for the chip’s dominance here, in WinZip, and in iTunes.
Core i7-990X spins up to 3.73 GHz with a single core active. That’s good enough to earn it a second-place finish.
WinZip remains the only single-threaded title in our benchmark suite, making it the least likely program we’d use on a modern multi-core platform (that sure helps explain the 3:00+ compression times).
Naturally, the Core i7-2600K takes another victory, followed by the Core i7-990X running as fast as 3.73 GHz in poorly-optimized apps like this one.
You get a lot more utilization out of the latest version of WinRAR. Using all six cores, Intel’s Core i7-990X scores a first-place finish, ducking in under the one-minute mark. The Core i7-980X comes in second, while the Core i7-960 places third. Despite its per-clock and raw frequency advantage, the Core i7-2600K falls into fourth place, suggesting a bottleneck elsewhere.
Our results in 7-Zip are right where we’d expect them given this (free) app’s threaded nature. The Core i7-990X takes first, followed by the Core i7-980X. Intel’s newer Sandy Bridge-based chip comes in third, trailed by the Core i7-960.
