picCOLOR
picCOLOR was created by Dr. Reinert H. G. Müller of the FIBUS Institute. This isn't Photoshop; picCOLOR's image analysis capabilities can be used for scientific applications like particle flow analysis. Dr. Müller has supplied us with new revisions of his program for some time now, all the while optimizing picCOLOR for new advances in CPU technology, including MMX, SSE2, and Hyper-Threading. Naturally, he's ported picCOLOR to 64 bits, so we can test performance with the x86-64 ISA. Eight of the 12 functions in the test are multithreaded, and in this latest revision, five of those eight functions use four threads.

Scores in picCOLOR, by the way, are indexed against a single-processor Pentium III 1 GHz system, so that a score of 4.14 works out to 4.14 times the performance of the reference machine.

It's not hard to pick out the four-threaded functions from among the individual results. The rotation and DCT functions seem to gain the most on the quad-core systems. Overall, though, the QX6700 proves faster than the FX-74 system.

The Panorama Factory
The Panorama Factory handles an increasingly popular image processing task: joining together multiple images to create a wide-aspect panorama. This task can require lots of memory and can be computationally intensive, so The Panorama Factory comes in a 64-bit version that's multithreaded. I asked it to join four pictures, each eight megapixels, into a glorious panorama of the interior of Damage Labs. The program's timer function captures the amount of time needed to perform each stage of the panorama creation process, so we can get a good look at each one. I've also added up the total operation time to give us an overall measure of performance.

Amazingly, virtually every stage of this program's operation appears to use at least four threads. Notice that the QX6700 is faster in nearly every stage than the X6800, despite its slower clock speed.

At the end of the day, our two quad-core systems turn out to be evenly matched in this app, although the FX-74 technically gets credit for the win.