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

The Xeon E5472s continue to post solid performance gains in this image processing application, finishing the panorama generation process nearly two seconds quicker than the Xeon X5365s. Looking at the results from the individual operations in this process, we can see small gains from the E5472s at nearly every stage. Proportionally, some of the biggest gains come in the stitch and render operations.

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.

The new Xeons post strong per-clock performance gains in some of picCOLOR's functions, especially in the Fourier (FFT/PWR) one, where the E5472s post a score of 17.71 versus the X5365's 11.62. I asked Dr. Müller about this function, and he said: "The FFT/PWR function calculates the Fourier transform of the image, then displays the power spectrum, and then reconstructs the original image by inverse Fourier transform." That makes this function a good candidate for taking advantage of Penryn's tweaks. In fact, the inner kernel of the FFT algorithm uses a bit shuffle function, and the power part of the function includes "a few MULs, one ADD, and one SQRT." So we should be seeing both Penryn's fast SSE shuffle and its optimized square root logic in action.