Intel Arrandale Core i5 and Core i3 Mobile Unveiled
LAME MT and H.264 Encoding
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.
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In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file (a painfully long 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.
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The x264 benchmark measures how fast a system can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality H.264 HD video clip. The application reports the compression results in frames per second for each pass of the video encoding process. The test is also multi-threaded, so it can take advantage of the additional resources afforded by multi-core processors.
Here the Core i5 540M shows a bunch more muscle over its Core 2 Duo ancestor. The 2.53GHz Arrandale-based Core i5 is 35 - 38% faster than the Core 2 Duo Penryn chip. The Core i7 920XM is anywhere from 18 to a wopping 51% faster in this test over the Core i5 540M but the Core i7 is a true quad-core with hyperthreading and thus has up to 8 threads of processing resources available to it.
