Office Applications
Unfortunately, complex benchmarks modeling the user behavior, such as SYSMark 2004 SE, do not work in Windows Vista. Therefore, we decided to estimate the typical office performance using the time it takes our test systems to resolve certain specific tasks. These tasks were the comparison of two versions of a large document in Microsoft Office Word 2007 and the calculation of a table with typical statistical operations in Microsoft Office Excel 2007.
Intel CPUs are again the leaders. The results in Excel were especially impressive, as they turned out over 100% faster than the AMD processors.
We have also tested the systems performance with the benchmark built into the 64-bit version of the 7-zip archiving tool. We looked at the archiving speed and data extraction from archives.
During data archiving the situation turned out pretty common: Athlon 64 X2 6000+ yields to the rivals on Core micro-architecture here. However, during data extraction from the archives AMD processors managed to demonstrate more impressive result. Note that it is the only task where AMD K8 micro-architecture revealed very competitive level of performance.