Image processing

Photoshop

Ouch. This is a result we've seldom seen in all of our experience with AMD's 45nm quad-core processors: the older 65nm Phenoms are actually faster. Not sure what to make of that one, other than to say that this performance was consistent for both Phenom II speed grades across multiple test runs. Odd.

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 widely 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 IIs recover with a respectable showing in our photo-stitching app. Below is a look at the individual operations required to create a panorama, if you care to see that sort of detail.

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. Many of the individual functions that make up the test are multithreaded.

Looks to me like the Phenom II's poor showing in Photoshop was some sort of anomaly. In our third image manipulation test, the Phenom IIs basically tie the Q9300 and Q9400.