Intel Core i7 970 Gulftown On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 27 October 2010 at 02:00 AM EDT. Page 4 of 9. 16 Comments.

Beginning with the 7-Zip compression test, to no real surprise we find the Core i7 970 well ahead of its competition as this open-source program was able to benefit from the greater number of cores even though the Core i7 870 is able to clock higher with its Turbo Frequency (3.6GHz with the i7-870 vs. 3.46GHz with the i7-970). The Core i7 970 was about 31% faster than the Core i7 870 and 43% faster than the Bloomfield Core i7 920.

When it came to compressing a 256MB file using Parallel BZIP2 compression, we again are in a rather ideal scenario for exploiting the twelve threads. It took just 7 seconds to compress the 256MB file using PBZIP2 while the Core i5 530 took almost four times longer and the Phenom II X3 710 was about three times longer. The closest competition here to the Core i7 970 was the dual AMD Opteron 2384 workstation that boasts eight physical cores between two CPUs.

Not only is x264 is a great open-source program for its H.264/MPEG-4 AVC encoding abilities, but it is also excellent for being a real-world use of these many-core CPUs. The Gulftown CPU was an incredible 51% faster than the Core i7 870, 63% faster than the dual AMD Shanghai workstation, and 67% faster than the Intel Bloomfield CPU.

GraphicsMagick, which is a fork of ImageMagick, utilizes the OpenMP library for parallel programming on newer versions of GCC. If you use GraphicsMagick for any of your image manipulation tasks, this is another great real-world example where Intel's six-core CPUs with Hyper Threading are able to shine.


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