Intel Core i7 970 Gulftown On Linux

The current version of POV-Ray (v3.6) is not multi-threaded and as such, the Core i7 970 lost out to the Core i7 870 in this ray-tracing program due to the slightly higher turbo frequency achieved by the Lynnfield CPU.

Smallpt is one of the newer Phoronix Test Suite test profiles and it is a global illumination renderer using Monte Carlo path tracing that is written in only about 100 lines of C++ code. While it is a very small and simple renderer, it does take advantage of OpenMP for providing multi-threading support. With Smallpt when using 100 samples, the Core i7 970 wound up performing the same as the AMD Opteron 2384 workstation.

Turning away from ray/path-tracing we have Crafty, which is an open-source chess program. Using Crafty for solving many games of chess, it was able to take surprising advantage of Intel's Gulftown.

With HMMer, which conducts a Pfam database search as part of our set of computational biology benchmarks in the Phoronix Test Suite, the Core i7 970 again provided the most favorable numbers while behind it were the dual Opteron 2384 workstation and then the Core i7 870 and Core i7 920.