Synthetic Application Performance

The MaxxPI² benchmark is again very intriguing as the AMD Phenom II X4 965 processor cleans up in the multi-threading test, beating even the Core i7 920 processor with a calculation time of just 10.9 seconds. When running the single-thread test, the Phenom II X4 965 tanks with a 60.2 second calculation time, which doesn't seem to add up. Still, having run the test several times, this is the result we received each time.

AMD's Phenom II X4 965 was 12% faster than the Core i5 750 in the multi-threading test, 5.5% faster than the Core i7 860 and just 2% faster than the Core i7 920. Conversely, when measuring single threaded performance with the MaxxPI² benchmark, the Phenom II X4 965 delivered half the performance of the Core i5 750.

Taking a quick look at single-thread throughput in MaxxPI² we see how the Phenom II X4 965 falls way behind, as it managed just 136K/sec, whereas the Core i5 750 was capable of 236K/sec. However, something kicks the Phenom II X4 965 into gear when running the multi-thread test, as throughput increases to 748K/sec and beats the 736K/sec of the Core i7 920 processor.

WinRAR is another good program for measuring processors' single and multi-thread performance. Here we see that the AMD Phenom II X4 965 struggles regardless of whether we are using just one or multiple threads.

The Core i5 750 was 25% faster than the Phenom II X4 965 in the multi-thread test, while it was just 3% slower than the Core i7 860 processor, which is surprising given that it lacks Hyper-Threading support. Finally the Core i7 920 is able to make use of its additional bandwidth, as it was found to be 5% faster than the Core i7 860.