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. We 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. We've also added up the total operation time to give us an overall measure of performance.

The scatter plot from our panorama stitching benchmark shows a pattern reminiscent of the previous two tests, but here the gap between dual- and quad-core chips is much narrower. As a result, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 is even worse off in our value chart.

On the dual-core front, where the value lies once again, we see an interesting pattern. AMD's dual-core offerings clearly outpace the competition from Intel, as highlighted by their greater proximity to the Y axis on our scatter plot. Take your pick here, but remember value still goes down the higher you climb on the price ladder. Barring the X2 3600+, we'd probably pick the X2 4400+ or the X2 5600+ ourselves.

This is as good a time as any for a brief intermission to point out some other trends we're seeing. So far, AMD's Athlon 64 FX-72 and FX-74 offerings fare quite poorly—and they'd fare even worse if we factored in the price premium for the only Quad FX motherboard out today, which costs around $330. We also see Intel's Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor consistently dipping toward the bottom right of our scatter plot, where value is worst. It really doesn't pay to be a premium dual-core chip in this day and age.

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.

Things are a little tighter in our picCOLOR benchmark. Here, the 3600+, E4300, 5000+, 5600+, and E6600 appear to be the best deals among dual-core offerings. The 4400+ isn't a bad choice by any means, but the E4300 outperforms it by a hair while costing slightly less.

Up on the quad-core front, the Q6600 is clearly the best choice here, although we shouldn't need to remind you that it still sits in the bottom half of our performance per dollar chart. In other words, it's a great chip if you can afford it and need the extra performance, but it's not a K-Mart blue-light special.