Results: Productivity
A retest confirms that productivity applications, aside from the office-oriented Acrobat X, are the best place to demonstrate the performance benefits of Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology. That feature is not available on Intel's Core i5 CPUs. And last quarter's build also loses out on 2 MB of shared L3 cache as well.
3ds Max does such a great job utilizing the physical cores of these processors that there's little left idle for Hyper-Threading to exploit. Nevertheless, the Core i7 gets a quantifiable boost in this benchmark.
Blender, ABBYY FineReader, and Visual Studio take big advantage of the logical cores to keep all of the physical cores busy, all of the time.