X-bit labs

Workstation Processors Duel: AMD Opteron against Intel Xeon (page 18)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 12/21/2005 | 08:44 PM ]

Video Editing

During our dual-core processor tests we have already mentioned that Adobe Premiere non-linear video editing system and Adobe After Effects package for visual effects and computer graphics are well-optimized for multi-processor systems. Let’s take a look at the performance of serious workstations in these applications:

Both these applications can make pretty good use of the advantages of multi-processor systems. For instance, a pair of dual-core Opteron CPUs is a lot faster than a pair of single-core Opterons working at much higher clock frequency. As a result, the system with Opteron 275 processors wins the race in Adobe Premiere 1.5. However, a pair of dual-core Xeon processors working at 2.8GHz fall behind a pair of single-core Xeon 3.6GHz. They might be lacking the clock speed. Although if we look at the frequencies of the single-core and dual-core processors from AMD and Intel, the difference will be pretty close. So, there should be some other reason for what we see here. Namely, it might be pretty hard to split the calculations into 8 parallel streams for the dual-processor Xeon 2.8GHz system, so Intel’s dual-core CPUs cannot get loaded to the top of their potential.

Image Editing

As we have just seen, Adobe took the optimization of their software applications for multi-processor platforms very seriously. I wonder if this is also true for Adobe Photoshop, which is one of the most popular graphics editing applications among professionals and amateurs. Let’s find out!

Unfortunately, we will not be able to discuss how this graphics editor is running on a system built with two dual-core Xeon CPUs. This application turned out absolutely startled by the platform with 8 logical processors and reported honestly its inability to comply upon startup. Therefore, the result for the Dual-Core Intel Xeon 2.8GHz you see on the diagram was taken when we ran Photoshop in single-thread mode, which enables automatically in this case.

As for the other results, the dual-core Opteron workstation won this race. Most filters included with Adobe Photoshop support multi-processor systems and get a pretty good performance boost when the calculations split into a few parallel threads.