X-bit labs

Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 Dual-Core CPU Review (page 12)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 05/17/2005 | 09:19 PM ]

Data Compression Applications

Unfortunately, WinRAR doesn’t support multi-threading, however, Pentium Extreme Edition 840 manages to outperform Pentium 4 570 in some mysterious way.

However, Pentium Extreme Edition 840 can also perform quite slowly in archiving utilities supporting multi-threading. Take, for instance, 7zip. The problem is that this utility is optimized for Hyper-Threading and works in two threads. The Windows XP Task manager distributing these threads among the four computational cores of the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 doesn’t know, unfortunately, to distinguish between the physical and virtual cores. That is why there might occur a situation when we will have two threads working within one physical core with hyper-Threading technology instead of two physical cores. This results into insufficient performance. BY the way, the same situations can occur in Pentium Extreme Edition 840 based systems in other applications optimized for Hyper-Threading as well.