X-bit labs

Contemporary Dual-Core Processors Shootout (page 5)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/30/2008 | 02:33 PM ]

Media Content Encoding

I believe there is no need to tell you again about the advantages of the Intel processors on 45nm cores. I would only like to add that they also support new SSE4 SIMD instructions that will increase their performance advantage even more as the software developers add their support into new codec versions.

Overall, all processors on Core micro-architecture do very well in audio and video content encoding applications. Those Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 X2 processors that have previously demonstrated similar performance numbers, differ dramatically in applications of this type, and the difference is obviously not in AMD’s favor. For example, Athlon 64 X2 6400+ performs as fast as Core 2 Duo E4600, while Pentium E2160 is often faster than Athlon 64 X2 4200+. However, some codecs can provide absolutely different results, as you can see from the chart for Mediaconcept H.264 Encoder.