Anandtech benches Nehalem

[JumpingJack]

Not true! Only multithreaded Lame was “Intel’s edition” 3.97a, real distribution wasn’t MThreaded ‘cos testing showed that MThreaded version produced lower quality of sound (everything is elaborated on LAME community forums)… iThunes is nowhere threaded!

Lame MP3 is indeed multithreaded, you can download a copy of a multithreaded version today, either Intel compiled or MS Compiled. iTunes is indeed multithreaded. (Oddly, Intel compiled LameMP3 improves pheonom performance several percentage points over the MS compiled version).

Photoshop is partially MThreaded… some filters, and some picture manipulation functions do use MThreading, but it’s not in big extent… unfortunately.

You are either multithreaded or not, there is no partial. This does not mean spawning uber threads for every task will be necessary, but it is indeed multithreaded -- as is most all of the Adobe software catalog.

iTunes most certianly is multhtreaded... oddly on my quad, when importing 300 gigs of lossless WMA .. average CPU utilization was about 57%... (just about over 2 cores)

EDIT: Here is a quick file convert using iTunes, notice 50% utilization with 22 threads

In Lost Planet, only some levels are MThreaded (Cave), WiC can’t see beyond 2 cores, so as Crysis who’s struggling to use second core more effectively. UT3 has the best MT optimization and will use a mush cores you can throw, but scaling beyond three cores is dropping rapidly. Not to mention 3DMArk who’s only using singlethread for graphic test!
who cares about superpi?

Lost Planet is indeed multithreaded throughout, even in Snow... 'levels' are data, engine is code. A game developer does not set a 'this level is multithreaded' switch when generating the maps. This is easy to prove, run lost planet in window mode, open task manager play and watch your CPU report. The loading on LP even on Snow loads 70-80% of the CPU (total) on a quad core.

I agree, UT3 is probably the best game engine out utilizing multicore. I published data in this forum showing that a few months ago.

My original point is ... software has been moving rapidly toward a mulithreaded base. I have been surprised at how quickly (relatively speaking) software has been moving toward multithreaded code ... when quads first arrives, maybe 10-15% of software was multhtreaded, that percntage is now well over 50% and going up.

Jack