AMD Phenom II X2 555 and Athlon II X4 635 Performance
Cinebench and LAME MT
Cinebench R10 is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by 3D animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.
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This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.
The Phenom II X2 555's high clock speed allows it to compete favorably with all of the other processors we tested in the single-threaded Cinebench R10 test, but in the multi-threaded test it can't hang with the quad-cores or the HT enabled Core i5 661. The exact opposite is true of the Athlon II X4 635, where its quad-cores help in the MT test, but its relatively low frequency hinders single-thread performance.
In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file (a hallucinogenically-induced 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, listed in seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance. LAME MT runs best on the Intel platform, as is evident by the performance results above. Only the 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q9400 trails AMD's newest processors, and even then it's only be a second in both tests against the roughly 600MHz faster Phenom II X2 555.
In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. LAME is an open-source mid to high bit-rate and VBR (variable bit rate) MP3 audio encoder that is used widely around the world in a multitude of third party applications.
