X-bit labs

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Dual-Core Processor Review (page 8)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 05/08/2005 | 09:11 PM ]

Performance in Digital Content Creation Applications

In this section we will again run some SYSmark 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation 2004 complex benchmarks.

This test emulated the user’s work in the following applications: Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1, Adobe Premiere 6.50, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980, NewTek LightWave 3D 7.5b, Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f. Since most applications for creation and processing of digital content do support multi-threading, the success of our Athlon 64 X2 4800+ processor is not surprising at all. I would even like to stress that this processor appears faster even when we do not have a few applications running at the same time.

When several applications are working in parallel, dual-core processors demonstrate even more impressive results. For example, here we have an image rendered by 3ds max 5.1 into a bmp-file, while the user is preparing web-pages in Dreamweaver MX. Then the user renders some 3D animation into vector graphics format.

Now we are emulating the user’s work in Premiere 6.5, when he is creating a video movie in raw-format from a few other movies and separate sound tracks. While waiting for the operation to be completed, the user is also modifying and saving to the hard drive a picture in Photoshop 7.01. When the video is finished, the user does the necessary editing and adds special effects to it in After Effects 5.5.

Again we see the gigantic advantage of the AMD dual-core architecture over the regular Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX as well as over the Pentium 4 with the “virtual” multi-threading implementation – Hyper-Threading technology.

And this is another triumph of the dual-core solution from AMD. And the reasons are just the same as in the previous case: they lie in the work model. Here, our hypothetical user extracts from the zip-archive the web-site content and at the same time opens an exported 3D vector video in Flash MX. Then the user modifies it by adding some new pictures and optimizes it for faster animation. The final video with applied special effects is then compressed with Windows Media Encoder 9 so that it could later be broadcast via internet. The created web-site is then composed in Dreamweaver MX, while the system is scanned for viruses with VirusScan 7.0.

So, we have to admit that dual-core architecture proved extremely efficient for applications working with digital content. Almost any tasks of the kind can load both processor cores simultaneously, which definitely speeds up the entire system.