Quote Originally Posted by automagic
redpriest quote "What I am perplexed about is why Conroe bombs on the encryption code"

Does this mean Conroe will not be as strong in video encoding as it is in other areas?
You cannot draw that conclusion for high-quality video encoding.

Most one-key encryption schemes and low-quality video encoding have a tendency not to care about the L2 CPU cache at all because they rip through so many data blocks (or frames squares) that memory bandwidth counts a lot. Things are either in the L1 cache or they go right through the L2 cache. Conroe is probably weaker here because of the lack of internal memory controller.

However, high-quality video encoding spends so much time on each frame that memory access doesn't play a big role. Same if you don't only encrypt the data but you do something with the data before encryption. Only "pure" encryption is subject to this.

The benchmarks in my signature illustrate that, too. It is clear that memory bandwidth and latency is most worthwhile with low-quality video encoding. But for high-quality video encoding even a stupid Celeron with no memory bandwidth and small L2 cache can be very fast.