Intel Core Duo (Yonah) Performance Preview - Part II

Professional Application Performance with 3dsmax, Adobe Premier and Photoshop

We start off our page on professional application performance with an updated version of the SPECapc 3dsmax test, updated for version 7 of the application.  The scenes being rendered haven't actually changed, but the reference numbers used to compute the composite scores have, so these scores aren't directly comparable to results from earlier SPECapc tests.

While we didn't have the Pentium M's 3dsmax results in the last article, you can pretty much tell how it would've turned out by looking at the numbers here.  Tasks such as 3D rendering are very easily parallelizable, so we see huge gains from going to a dual core processor, not to mention that the FP/SSE optimizations that went into Intel's Core Duo have a chance to flex their muscles here as well. 

Compared to the Athlon 64 X2, the Core Duo comes out on top, but by a very small margin - once again we're faced with a virtual tie.

The breakdown of the rendering composite score can be found below; the scores in the table are render time in seconds, lower numbers are better:

SPECapc 3dsmax 7 Breakdown	AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+	AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+	AMD Athlon 64 X2 2.0GHz/1MB	Intel Core Duo T2500	Intel Pentium M 760
3dsmax 5 rays	15.406	15.829	16.109	14.297	25.246
CBALLS2	20.125	22.281	22.094	21.187	42.201
SinglePipe2	92.844	101.906	101.922	107.359	203.492
UnderWater	142.938	157.219	156.203	169.188	316.055

Moving onto Adobe Premier Pro 1.5, this test is actually one that is used by Intel to showcase the performance of the Pentium 4 processor.  With the Pentium 4 absent from this comparison, we were curious as to how it compared to the Core Duo and the Pentium M. 

The test itself just ends up being little more than a media encoding test, as it times how long it takes to export a MPEG-2 file to a compressed format using Windows Media Encoder 9 with Advanced Profile.  The times that are reported are in minutes, with lower values being better. 

As with virtually any media encoding performance, dual-core processors do extremely well, and this case is no different with the Core Duo T2500 seriously outpacing the Pentium M 760. 

The Core Duo T2500 is also able to complete the export process in about 97% of the time of the Athlon 64 X2, which once again ends up being borderline negligible for this test, but it is important to note that this advantage comes without the aid of an on-die memory controller.

Our final test is the only other Intel-supplied test in the suite. This one used to showcase the Pentium 4's performance under Adobe Photoshop CS2 by measuring the time that it takes to run a few filters and resize/export images.  The script itself is fairly realistic; however, with Photoshop filters, it is easy to favor one architecture over another, so by no means are these numbers intended to be conclusive of Photoshop CS2 performance. 

The main point of comparison is to show, once again, the advantages of the Core Duo over the Pentium M.  The Core Duo also holds an advantage over the Athlon 64 X2 in this case, offering performance equal to that of the X2 4200+, despite a 200MHz clock speed deficit.