Cinebench
Graphics is a classic example of a computing problem that's easily parallelizable, so it's no surprise that we can exploit a many-core system with a 3D rendering app. Cinebench is the first of those we'll try, a benchmark based on Maxon's Cinema 4D rendering engine. It's multithreaded and comes with a 64-bit executable. This test runs with just a single thread and then with as many threads as CPU cores are available.

The Xeons stake out an early lead over the Opterons. Notice how the Xeon 5355 system turns out to be slower than the Xeon 5160 in the single-threaded version of this test. That's to be expected in single-threaded applications because of the 5355's lower clock frequency.

The multithreaded version of Cinebench doesn't scale as well as it probably could on an eight-way system, because each stage of the rendering process finishes very quickly, as you might be able to tell from the Task Manger graph. With a higher output resolution, multiple frames, or a more complex scene, I suspect the dual Xeon 5355 system to open up an even larger lead on the other two.

POV-Ray rendering
After holding out for quite a while, we've finally caved in and moved to the beta version of POV-Ray 3.7 that includes native multithreading. The 64-bit executable is still quite a bit slower than the 3.6 release, but it should give us a decent look at comparative performance, regardless.

The eight-core Xeon 5355 is able to put all of its cores to use here, and the results are spectacular. The dual Xeon 5355 system renders the scene in just over half the time that the dual Opteron 2218 system does. Among the quad-core systems, the Xeon 5160 is again faster.

3dsmax 9 rendering
For our 3ds max test, we used the "architecture" scene from SPECapc for 3ds max 7. This scene is very complex and should be nice exercise for these CPUs. Using 3ds max's default scanline renderer, we rendered a single frame of this scene at 1920x1080 resolution.

Here's another impressive showing from the Clovertown Xeons. Meanwhile, the Opterons are well off the pace established by even the Woodcrest Xeons.