Image processing, file compression

Photoshop

With AMD processors at a disadvantage because of the NCQ issue we mentioned, Intel's offerings reign supreme in Photoshop CS2. The Core 2 Duo E8400 looks particularly strong here, almost nipping at the Core i7-920's heels. Then again, a newer version of Photoshop or a different mix of filters might be more multithreaded and thus better able to take advantage of additional processor cores.

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. We 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, but we'll be looking at the total operation time today.

Extra cores matter a lot more in The Panorama Factory, where the Core 2 Quad Q8200 looks compelling despite being clocked a whole gigahertz below the Core 2 Duo E8600. The Core 2 Quad Q9400 isn't a bad alternative, although the extra performance it brings will cost you an extra $50.

WinZip file compression

Same deal as with Photoshop CS2: this is an older release that seems to favor dual-core CPUs, and Phenoms perform poorly here because of the NCQ problem from which AMD's south bridges suffer.