X-bit labs

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processors: Quad-Core CPUs Gone Real! (page 6)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 11/01/2006 | 10:31 PM ]

Video and Audio Encoding

Multi-threading support found its way into video and audio codecs quite a while ago already. However, the results below demonstrate that far not all the codecs can really load all the four cores with sufficient amount of work. Most of them generate only two threads and hence Kentsfield cannot boast any advantages here. However, there are a few absolutely opposite examples, too.

Some codecs recognize all the four processor cores in the system and prove highly efficient in Kentsfield based platforms. The relative advantage of Core 2 Extreme QX6700 over the predecessor, Core 2 Extreme X6800 makes 20-35% in Xvid and TMPCEnc.

However, it turns out that not all the codecs can still engage all the four processor cores simultaneously. Many of them can demonstrate a significant performance boost only when we switch from single- to dual-core processors which makes Kentsfield absolutely useless in this case.

In other words, even the applications that we used before to demonstrate the advantages of dual-core architectures may not serve the same purpose in case of quad-core CPUs performance analysis.