Speech recognition
Sphinx is a high-quality speech recognition routine that needs the latest computer hardware to run at speeds close to real-time processing. We use two different versions, built with two different compilers, in an attempt to ensure we're getting the best possible performance.

There are two goals with Sphinx. The first is to run it faster than real time, so real-time speech recognition is possible. The second, more ambitious goal is to run it at about 0.8 times real time, where additional CPU overhead is available for other sorts of processing, enabling Sphinx-driven real-time applications.

Sphinx isn't multithreaded and leans heavily on the memory subsystem, so it's no suprise to see the results we do here. Nonetheless, the P4 3.06GHz with RDRAM produces some astounding numbers. Only the Athlon XP system with a 333MHz bus, the 2800+ system, can run with the Pentium 4 systems in Sphinx.

picCOLOR image processing
picCOLOR came to us via Dr. Reinert Mueller, who wanted us to test his image processing program on a dual-processor Athlon system for him. We're glad we obliged him, because picCOLOR does a nice job testing common image processing-related functions with multiple threads. For this test, we've cleared off the table and just included results for an SMT system and an SMP system.

You can tell that some of the tests are multithreaded, while others aren't. Let's look at the relative performance gains.

Incidentally, in order to make this graph readable, I've not reported performance decreases, of which there were a few. Overall, the performance increases more than offset the few decreases.

In some cases where SMP helps a fair amount, Hyper-Threading offers no benefit. However, in a few cases, HT does quite well.