The Core i7 980X Review: Intel's First 6-Core Desktop CPU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 11, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
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.
An application needs to be more than multithreaded to take advantage of the 980X, it needs to demand more than four threads. And our PAR2 test is pushing it as is, there's no advantage to the 980X here.
WinRAR - Archive Creation
Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:
Our WinRAR test takes advantage of the larger L3 cache and thus we see roughly a 9% performance advantage for the 980X compared to the 975.
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.
If you're running any sort of computationally intensive Excel macros, the 980X will deliver. The financial market just wet themselves.
Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation
Although technically a test simulating the creation of a Blu-ray disc, the majority of the time in our Sony Vegas Pro benchmark is spend encoding the 25Mbps MPEG-2 video stream and not actually creating the Blu-ray disc itself.
Even when the application doesn't scale perfectly with core count, we still see some impressive gains. Our MPEG-2 Blu-ray creation test showed a hefty 20% performance improvement over the 975. If you do any sort of video encoding or Blu-ray authoring, the 980X is perfect for you.
Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation
Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.
FLV authoring shows another healthy gain of 30% over the quad-core 975.
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Meghan54 - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
[QUOTE]where are you getting your xeon pricing info from?all i can find from any solid source is the current xeon quad core processors which are running about $2000 on newegg at the moment. [/QUOTE]
Well, I question your search skills at Newegg, then, if that's all you can find there.
Just an FYI, Newegg has MANY, MANY sub-$700 Xeon processors for socket 1366, like the W3520, a Bloomfield, for $310, or the W3550 for $600--both Bloomfield quad-core cpus.
Learn to use search, (ps....main page, cpu/processors, processors-servers, power search, check box socket 1366, look at results. I'm hoping you do understand that there are mouse clicks between step.)
formulav8 - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
grow up...softdrinkviking - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
no, i saw all of that stuff. i was looking at the six core chips and i typed quad instead.but thanks for getting all nasty and sarcastic anyway.
i'll try to remember about those mouse clicks next time.
the point i was trying to make is that the xeon line is going to be more expensive than the comparable home desktop CPUs and that it won't be a simple matter of non-server customers just buying xeons that will outclass the current i7 line-up. (specifically to compete against the 6 core model that this review is about)
Drag0nFire - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
I think the point was that you could get 2x cheap quad core Xeons, and run with 8 cores (16 threads) at a small price premium over the $1000 Gulftown.vol7ron - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
I will keep my eyes open for the Xeon, but for some reason, those typically are quite pricey. This $1k price will fall, hopefully sooner, rather than later.I am looking forward to both.
Thanks for the read, Anand,
vol7ron
DrMrLordX - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
Here's a list of Gulftown quads for LGA1366:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_future_Intel_...">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fu...rocessor...
The information isn't complete, but you should be able to do searches on the part that interests you most and get the information that you want.
iamezza - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
it won't be dropping in price any time soon. Check the chart on Pg 3 - this is the top intel CPU until 2011 and I can't see AMD releasing a CPU that will compete performance wise with it before then.DarkUltra - Monday, May 3, 2010 - link
I also miss memory and cache performance tests, and memory overclock results.Kn0xx - Monday, May 17, 2010 - link
well, this new 6 core comer, will be ( probably ) the entry design for 128 -bit processors that Intel are already working on it.128 bit need new multi-core structures. so ..980X is an example of how can a 128-bit core would be =)
unmaskedtruth - Sunday, May 23, 2010 - link
does anyone know if protools le 8.0 is multi-threaded? for recording pro music, is it going to be able to take advantage of "6cores" if i was to go i7-980x route? or is quad-core more than sufficient? cause there is i7-930 which is cost like 80% less than the 980x. what do you guys suggest?