kosobai wrote:Take these benchmarks with a pinch of salt; it's well known that Intel's compiler cripples AMD CPUs on Windows. If you're running Linux, you'll get pure, unadulterated speed on any 1xxxt X6 cpu.
It only affects a small number of programs that are compiled on (IIRC older?) Intel compilers, though some of them can be important for specific peoples, and this happens on both Windows and Linux (Intel compilers for both, and I expect mostly the same programs to be affected).
Handbrake is compiled using gcc on all platforms (not Intel) and the really performance critical parts is mostly hand-coded assembler. So performance difference for Handbrake between OS is basically a test of how good/bad the OS scheduler is for this special case, for a long while Linux got trounced by Windows but it's been fixed.
kosobai wrote:While we're on the subject of benchmarks, my 1065t system achieves a Geekbench score of 9812 (Ubuntu). That puts it ahead of the i7 2600, if the Geekbench PC benchmarks page is to be believed, and for 100 bucks less, too. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Intel! LOL
1065T doesn't seem to have an official Geekbench score, but the faster 1090T Extreme officially has a lower score than that! It's rated at 8074, while the i7-2600 clocks in at 9500, presumably under similar circumstances. But the benchmark browser also shows that the Geekbench numbers are
highly unreliable, with very different scores for the same CPU and frequency! Seriously, with that kind of variability it's not worth anything as "benchmark", if anything it's actively misleading.
But several people have noted earlier that AMD's 6-core desktop chips are generally good value for video encoding, similar performance to Intel's 4-core models at somewhat lower "system price" (CPU and motherboard). However, since very few things can use that many cores the same Intel 4-core models generally stomps the X6 models at almost everything else, even at the same cost level, before video decoding was multi-threaded this sometimes happened even when doing video encoding!
Basically, if you want a machine that's not optimized only for video encoding AMD has good alternatives up to the mid-range X4's when looking at the whole system price, then it's Intel only. AMD's Bulldozer derived chips might still change that but the tests on the server versions looks much less promising than people had hoped, but they may well be able to fix it (early Phenom's also had issues that they had to fix).