Date:
Monday , September 07, 2009
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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Intel Lynnfield Core i5 and Core i7 Processors

Intel today launches its new Lynnfield processor based on its tremendously dominant Nehalem architecture. New Lynnfield processors bring with them a new socket that commands a new series of motherboards and both are very much on track to capture a huge share of the enthusiast computer hardware market.

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Multimedia Benchmarks

Outside of gaming and encoding, there are few applications on the desktop that will push our systems to their limits. Especially when we start talking about dual core processors that are becoming the norm now days. Some encoding apps are really starting to shine and become usable by the masses.

The benchmarks below all represent very real world situations just like you would run into at home while encoding video from your camcorder - or while using a picture editing program - or while encoding music for your iPod - or making movies with something as simple as Windows Movie Maker - or encoding a DVD for saving it to your hard drive to allow you easier access to the content.

We have simply timed our various tests on the different systems and supplied you with the amount of time it took for the system to fully build the file. Scratch disks were used properly as well as making sure we were not bumping into any IO bottlenecks elsewhere.

Lame 3.98.1

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LAME represents a very much single threaded application for ripping .wav music files to .mp3. Instances such as this is what Intel targets with its Turbo function. Say for instance with our Core i5-750, its "stock" speed is 2.66GHz. When running this application by itself, you should see your core processor speed jump to 3.2GHz allow you more cycles per second in order to get the work done. Do be clear that we have turned Turbo and all other power saving features off for all of our benchmarks though.

With our Core i5 and i7 processors at equal clocks, there is very little difference in the time it takes to encode our 1 hour .wav file to mp3. We do however see the same scaling at 2.66Ghz and at 3.2GHz.

Again our AMD Phenom II takes it right in the kisser even compared to our aging Core 2 processor.

WinRAR v3.80

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While WinRAR is single-threaded and processor centric, it does also rely heavily on memory bandwidth for performance. Given our synthetic scores, I would not have guessed we would have seen the delta here that we did between our Core i7 processors. I am still a bit in a quandary about this 10% difference and will be following up to see if others have a comparable experience.

Again, the Phenom II drags up the rear.

TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress v4.6.2.266

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TMPEGnc represents a video encoding application that is very thread aware. The power of Intel’s HyperThreading can easily be seen in the results as the Core i5 is dominated by the Core i7 processors. Our Core i7 processors do a bit of give and take here though looking nearly identical again.

The Phenom II comes close squeaking out a victory over the Core 2, but just misses.

Videora IPod Converter

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Videora is another highly thread aware application that encodes video, primarily for iPod device usage. We again seen close to the same scaling as we did above but the advantage of HyperThreading is not nearly as pronounced this time.

Again, Phenom II manages a last place finish even by Intel’s least expensive Nehalem processor.