3D Games

Games have always been among those applications that are very sensitive to the size of L2 cache memory. It seems to be the case this time also: 12MB L2 cache of the new Yorkfield processor did its job very well. In some games Core 2 Extreme QX9650 outperforms Core 2 Extreme QX6850 by almost 7%. The overall average advantage of the new processor in 3D games rests around 4%.

Media-Content Encoding

The existing media codecs versions do not yet support SSE4 instructions, although there are a few instructions in this set that can speed up the codecs performance significantly. That is why we expect to see a noticeable performance difference between the 45nm and old 65nm processors during media content encoding in the future. The results obtained in DivX 6.7 are a perfect illustration to this statement: this codec version already knows to perform experimental SSE4 full search. So, the new processor supporting SSE4 turns about 30% faster.

By the way, we performed some additional tests and found out that the performance boost in DivX 6.7 depends a lot on the type of the encoded movie. In our test fragment featuring a battle scene Yorkfield processor was only 30% faster, however, the movie suggested by Intel, with water surface ripples being the major part of it revealed almost 70% performance boost in Yorkfield?s case.

Other Applications

We decided to include another four widely spread applications in our test session and had to single them out in this part of our article, as they do not belong to any of the previous sections.

The applications we have just shown illustrate perfectly that Yorkfield processors may provide much higher performance than Kentsfield even in those tasks where new SSE4 instructions aren?t supported. Other innovations, such as larger L2 cache and accelerated division seem to be doing the job just fine in this case.