Cinebench and POV-Ray

Cinebench and POV-Ray are two applications that render images in very different ways. POV-Ray is a ray tracing program that has the ability to render photo realistic images. Ray tracing is one of the many routes that may be pursued for future graphic cards but at this point processors aren't fast enough to render scenes in real-time. Cinebench on the other hand uses a more standard animation suite called CINEMA 4D from MAXON and provides a "real-world" example of number crunching while providing an easy way to differentiate between different hardware configurations.

Judging by POV-Ray and Cinebench, Phenom II is slightly slower clock-per-clock compared to Core i7. Having half as many available threads guarantees a loss for Phenom II in SMP applications. With that being said, it looks like a 3.2GHz Phenom II would equal a 2.66GHz Core i7 in single-threaded and weakly-threaded applications.