Now let’s measure the performance of AMD’s new value product at encoding audio and video. We took a 64-bit version of the LAME codec (it is beta version so far) to test the speed of encoding music into MP3 format.

The NetBurst architecture usually shows its strong points in encoding tasks, but this time the Sempron 3400+ is definitely better than the Celeron D 351. This is due to the 64-bit version of the LAME codec slowing down on Intel’s processors.

It’s the same at encoding video with the 32-bit DivX 6.0 codec that has been optimized for the K8 architecture since the previous version. Besides that, Celeron D processors do not support Hyper-Threading technology which positively affects the speed of the NetBurst architecture in multi-threading applications.

We should note that it is the CPU clock rate rather than the cache memory amount or the memory subsystem performance that determines the speed of a processor at encoding media data. That’s why the Sempron 3400+ wins these two tests when overclocked to 2.6GHz.

The same can be said about data compression tasks. To test the performance of the CPU at data compression and decompression we used the 7-zip program, which is already available in a 64-bit version.