WorldBench overall performance
WorldBench's overall score is a pretty decent indication of general-use performance for desktop computers. This benchmark uses scripting to step through a series of tasks in common Windows applications and then produces an overall score for comparison. WorldBench also records individual results for its component application tests, allowing us to compare performance in each. We'll look at the overall score, and then we'll show individual application results alongside the results from some of our own application tests.

Well, Core 2 processors don't just excel at 3D gaming. They've also taken the top three spots in WorldBench, and their margins of victory are impressive. The Core 2 Extreme opens up a huge lead on the Athlon 64 FX-62, setting a new WorldBench record (at least for us) in the process. Oh, and the Pentium Extreme Edition is a staggering 43 points behind the Core 2 Extreme X6800.

Audio editing and encoding

LAME MP3 encoding
LAME MT is, as you might have guessed, a multithreaded version of the LAME MP3 encoder. LAME MT was created as a demonstration of the benefits of multithreading specifically on a Hyper-Threaded CPU like the Pentium 4. (Of course, multithreading works even better on dual-core processors.) You can download a paper (in Word format) describing the programming effort.

Rather than run multiple parallel threads, LAME MT runs the MP3 encoder's psycho-acoustic analysis function on a separate thread from the rest of the encoder using simple linear pipelining. That is, the psycho-acoustic analysis happens one frame ahead of everything else, and its results are buffered for later use by the second thread. The author notes, "In general, this approach is highly recommended, for it is exponentially harder to debug a parallel application than a linear one."

We have results for two different 64-bit versions of LAME MT from different compilers, one from Microsoft and one from Intel, doing two different types of encoding, variable bit rate and constant bit rate. We are encoding a massive 10-minute, 6-second 101MB WAV file here, as we have done in many of our previous CPU reviews.

MusicMatch Jukebox

There are no real surprises here. The Core 2 processors excel at audio encoding and editing, just as they seem to everywhere else.