Benchmarks: Multi-threaded Performance
Making full use of the six cores available to our trio of Westmere parts, 7-Zip shows the benefit of hexa-core processing power.
The Core i7 990X reigns supreme in this test, but as expected it's only slightly ahead of 980X and isn't a million miles away from Core i7 970 - a hexa-core chip that costs nearly £350 less.
Get all six cores / twelve threads crunching numbers in wPrime, and Intel's hyper-threaded hexa-core parts are untouchable. The higher-clocked Core i7 990X is of course the pick of the bunch.
It's a similar story in our multi-threaded media-encoding benchmark. Intel's hexa-core 990X tops the chart, but the graph doesn't tell the whole story. Plug any of the Sandy Bridge processors into an IGP-supporting H57 chipset and the integrated Quick Sync technology comes into play, delivering class-leading performance from a single-chip solution.
The TrueCrypt benchmark results are an average of the encryption and decryption speeds, over eight algorithms, when using a 100MB buffer.
Intel's 32nm processors - Westmere and Sandy Bridge - all support the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and run circles around the rest of the line up.
Rendering a 3D scene with over 300,000 polygons in Cinebench is light work for the Core i7 990X. Half-a-dozen hyper-threaded cores running at 3.46GHz sure do come in handy.
Four-core / eight-thread Sandy Bridge performance is good, but both the Core i7 2600K and Core i5 2500K are no match last-gen hexa-core parts when heavily multi-threaded workloads are applied.
