Application Performance

The Black-Scholes model was used to calculate a theoretical call and put price using the five key determinants of an option's price: stock price, strike price, volatility, time to expiration, and short-term (risk free) interest rate. The workload is an execution of approximately 300,000 iterations of Monte Carlo simulation using the Black-Scholes basic option pricing formula in Microsoft Excel 2010. In addition, the workload uses Excel lookup functions to compare the put price from the model with the historical market price for 50,000 rows to understand the convergence. The input file is a ~70 MB spreadsheet.

The new Intel Core i7 2600K and Core i5 2500K appear slightly more efficient in this test when compared to the older 45nm Core i7 and Core i5 processors. The Core i7 2600K was 14% faster than the Core i7 975 Extreme Edition processor, while it only had a 2% clock speed advantage. The Core i5 2500K was 22% faster than the Core i5 750, though it's also clocked 24% faster.

Our custom WinRAR test is broken into two different tests. The first measures the time it takes to compress a single large audio/video file while the second measures the time it takes to compress a small program containing multiple files.

As you can see both the Sandy Bridge CPUs are very fast, though when compared to the existing LGA1366 Core i7 processors they provide no real performance gains. Moreover the Core i5 2500K might have been 23% faster than the Core i5 750, but it was also clocked 24% faster.

Using an 88 Megapixel image in Adobe Photoshop CS5 we apply the radial blur filter and measure the time it takes each processor to complete this task. This software takes advantage of up to 12 threads and as a result we do see quite a difference in performance when comparing the Intel Core i7 2600K and Core i5 2500K processors.

The Core i7 2600K was 24% faster than the Core i5 2500K and 8% faster than the Core i7 975 Extreme Edition.

TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining on-the-fly-encrypted volumes (data storage device). On-the-fly encryption means that data is automatically encrypted or decrypted right before it is loaded or saved, without any user intervention. The workload is a benchmark mode that measures bandwidth available in a given system to apply the Advances Encryption Standard FIPS approved algorithm to a 100MB piece of memory.

As you can clearly see due to the implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Instruction Set, the Intel Core i7 2600K and Core i5 2500K processors provide a significant performance advantage in this program. Performance is around 5x greater than that of the Core i7 975 Extreme Edition.