Image processing

Photoshop

The Phenom IIs perform better here than the older Phenoms, as expected. Yet even the fastest Phenom II trails the slowest Intel processor, the Q8200, by over 30 seconds.

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 Q8200 finishes just a little sooner than the X4 810 here. Despite the relatively strong performance of the Intel processors in this application, though, the Phenom X3 720's additional core puts it ahead of the E8400.

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.

The 720's third core isn't sufficient to give it the advantage over the E8400 in this application, even though it is multithreaded. The Q8200 and X4 810 are in a familiar place, meanwhile: a dead heat.