Tom's CPU Architecture Shootout: 16 CPUs, One Core Each, And 3 GHz

Benchmark Results: Audio/Video Benchmarks

AMD and Intel both manage to reduce processing time in single-threaded audio conversions from one architectural generation to the next. Once again we see that large and smart caches are very helpful, and it is very obvious that Intel’s Core processor family beats AMD's portfolio, which in turn is of course significantly more affordable.

Expectedly, the results of iTunes and the Lame MP3 encoder (both single-threaded) are somewhat similar. If you encode or transcode a lot of music and still use a Pentium 4, then it’s probably about time to replace your system.

The performance differences between AMD and Intel processors increased over time. Intel continues introducing improvements from one product generation to the next, while AMD's architectural choices are more evolutionary in nature.

Once again the Pentium 4 delivers really bad performance compared to everything else today. Perhaps an Atom would have been a better choice for comparison?

Here we see different results, but the placing is very similar in MainConcept.

Bear in mind that these results are representative of a single processing core, and that video applications scale pretty well with multiple processing cores. Really, the purpose of our analysis here is to compare architectures, with all else equal. Factoring in parallelism would change the outcome drastically.