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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: Out of Copenhagen Test Configurations Memory Subsystem Power Consumption 3D Rendering Energy Efficiency Cinebench AV Encoding: DVD-Shrink, DrDivX, MainConcept AV Encoding: Virtualdub / DivX and SSE4 Gaming: 3DMark '06 FarCry F.E.A.R. Overclocking Final Words Give Us Some Feedback on this Review
Intel's Penryn Core Turns Yorkfield at 3.0 GHz P1266 at 45nm, 12 MB L2 Cache, and SSE4 Instruction Set
(Review by MS, October 28, 2007)

Audio Visual Content Creation and Media Encoding

Virtualdub / DivX 6.7 and SSE4 Instruction Set Improvements

Virtualdub 1.7.1 and higher with DivX 6.7 are optimized for SSE4 instructions to provide a significant performance gain over encoding in SSE2 mode. A 66 MB mpg file was converted to AVI format using the DivX 6.7 CODEC. For comparison, we ran the same workload in 4 or 6 different settings in the case of the Conroe/Kentsfield or Yorkfield core, respectively.

The CODEC settings were specified as Experimental SSE4 full search set to:

Disabled                   

Enabled using SSE2

Enabled using SSE4
with Enhanced multithreading enabled or disabled for each mode.

All data shown were acquired using the ASUS P5K3 with DDR3 running at the highest memory frequency supported for any given CPU - depending on the host bus frequency specification of the processor. Since the memory runs in syncronous mode at its fastest setting, the 1333 MHz processors (333 MHz bus clock) were capable of taking advantage of the same memory frequency, whereas the 1067 MHz CPUs (266 MHz bus clock) were running DDR3 at 1067 MHz data rate and the P4 840 Extreme Edition accessed the memory at 800 MHz. All runs were done in WindowsXP SP2 and replicated in Vista 64 Ultimate Edition with no difference in the outcome between operating systems. For comparison, data from the QuadFX system using two AMD FX74 processors in Vista 64 Ultimate Edition are shown.

MPG to AVI conversion

Encoding time in seconds: lower is better!

Enhanced multithreading provides a 3-5% performance increase primarily on quad-core systems. More interesting, though is the fact that completely disabling the Experimental SSE4 full search increases the performance by more or less 30%. With SSE4, the negative effects of running in SSE2 emulation of SSE4 are mitigated but the performance still does not reach that of running in SSE4-disabled mode. In contrast, the FX74 system performs best using SSE2 mode with enhanced multithreading enabled

Yorkfield in Detail

Encoding time in seconds: lower is better!

For clarification, the isolated results of the Yorkfield runs are shown above. Running in Experimental SSE4 mode using the SSE2 instruction set causes a dramatic performance hit. Matching the SSE4 requirements of the software with the SSE4 instruction set mitigates the negative impact of using SSE2 instructions but still does not reach the performance levels of just turning SSE4 mode completely off. The SSE2 vs. SSE4 numbers match the results leaked earlier by Intel..

(BX80557E6300)

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