AMD's Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition

PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance

Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive

Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.

AMD's Phenom II has traditionally done quite well in our PAR2 recovery test, the 955 continues the tradition. It's the i7's Hyper Threading that gives it the significant edge here, but the Q9550 can't stand a chance.

Blender 2.48a

Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.

This is one of those unfortunate cases where switching platforms actually robbed us of performance, the 955 should outperform the 940 here but it put out numbers a bit slower than our older AM2+ platform which unfortunately doesn't have support for the new CPU just yet. Either way, the Q9550 is too far ahead to be toyed with.

Microsoft Excel 2007

Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.

In those scenarios where Intel has a distinct architectural or optimization advantage, the Phenom II doesn't stand a chance. That is unfortunately one downside AMD has to deal with. Intel's developer relations team is much larger and works much harder to ensure that more applications and workloads are optimized as best as possible for Intel CPUs.