AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 - Finally, An Enthusiast's Dual Core
WME9/Mozilla Multi-tasking & LAME MP3
Continuing on in our media encoding vein, we took a look at media encoding and conversion while multi-tasking with a web browser. WorldBench 5's WME and Mozilla Multitasking module adds a bit more work to the mix, with a very common usage model, that of an end user taking time out to surf the web while a video file is being encoded.
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There's no need to provide extensive analysis for you here, you realize a full-fledged beating when you see it. Even the fastest Pentium Extreme Edition dual core CPU can't compete with the Athlon 64 FX-60, not by a long shot. Even the single core FX-57 takes Intel's fastest chip to task here.
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In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a very popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis, to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. The LAME MP3 DLL is one of the most widely used MP3 audio encoding engines in the market today, utilized by many third party software vendors. In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file (a never-ending Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application in single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below. Once again, shorter times equate to better performance.
In our single threaded tests, the Pentium 4 EE and Athlon 64 FX-57 share a photo-finish but our multi-threaded Lame MP3 encoding tests show a more significant advantage on the Intel side of the fence. The Pentium EE 955 boasts a 6 second lead on the Athlon 64 FX-60, what equates to a roughly a 13% performance advantage and the slower 3.2GHz core Pentium Extreme Edition 840 was also able to edged past the FX-60. Though not as decisive a victory as the Athlon 64s took our Windows Media Encoder tests with WB5, LAME MP3 audio conversion is pretty much all Intel here.
