X-bit labs

Phenom CPU: Christmas Gift from AMD (page 12)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 12/19/2007 | 05:35 PM ]

Media Content Encoding

Overall, the results are what we expected them to be: AMD cannot boast victory during audio and video content encoding.

However, the diagrams above also have a few exceptions. As we see, Phenom processors cope pretty well with H.264 encoding, at least their relative result in this test is much better than in all other cases. I can even state that the new quad-core AMD processors prove worthy rivals to Core 2 Quad. The FPU and SSE unit improvements introduced in the new AMD CPUs seem to have paid back under a certain type of workload. Nevertheless, the upcoming Core 2 Quad processors based on 45nm cores will also improve the performance of the Intel processor family. As a result, Phenom may no longer feel competitive even in this application in the near future.

We would also like to say a few words about Phenom’s defeat in iTunes test. The lag is significantly greater here. It must be the fact that integer units in the new Phenom processors that are actively involved into mp3 decoding process have hardly been improved in any way compared with the Athlon 64 processor family.