Image processing

Photoshop

WorldBench's PhotoShop test goes poorly for the AMD processors. It's possible the difference here is made by the Core 2 processors' larger L2 caches—up to 12MB, in the case of the 45nm quad-core processors. Even with the addition of a 2MB L3 cache, the Phenom's effective cache size is smaller than the Core 2 Duo E6750's 4MB L2.

The Panorama Factory photo stitching
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 Phenom 9900 matches the Core 2 Quad Q6600 here, but the 9600 is a little slower. Once again, versus the FX-74, the Phenom does achieve a tangible per-clock performance gain.

picCOLOR image analysis
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.

Here's a case where the K10 looks for all the world like a quad-core K8.