Cinebench
Graphics is a classic example of a computing problem that's easily parallelizable, so it's no surprise that we can exploit a multi-core processor 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 theme of clock-for-clock performance gains continues in Cinebench, where the 45nm Xeons' faster divider and SSE shuffle capabilities may be coming into play. The E5472s are only slightly faster than the X5365s with only a single thread in use, but the new Xeons scale better up to eight threads than the older models. Again, Intel is putting more distance between its top chip and AMD's future Opteron 2360 SE.

POV-Ray rendering
We caved in and moved to the beta version of POV-Ray 3.7 that includes native multithreading. The latest beta 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 per-clock performance gains come to a halt in POV-Ray, where the E5472s essentially match the X5365s. That still puts them in a tie for first place, though.

By the way, this beta version of POV-Ray seems to have a problem with single-threaded tasks bouncing around from one CPU core to the next, and this causes especially acute problems on NUMA systems. Since the vast majority of the computation time for the benchmark scene involves such single-threaded work, things turn out badly for the Opteron 2300s.