Intel's Core 2 Duo processors

MP3 Encoding:

We used LAME MT for our audio encoding test - it's the multithreaded version of the popular LAME MP3 encoder. We ran tests with both Intel's and Microsoft's compilers - naturally, the Intel compiler resulted in some performance increases on Intel's processors. We converted all 18 tracks from Moby's popular Play album to a 192kbps variable bit-rate MP3.

The performance of Intel's Core 2 Duo processors was nothing short of incredible. The Core 2 Extreme X6800 was nearly 60% faster when using the Microsoft compiler, and the performance gap increased when using the Intel compiler.

MP3 to WAV Decoding:

For our decoding test, we converted the MP3 tracks created in the previous test back to .WAV format, saving the output to a different folder.

The three 4MB L2 cache Core 2 Duo chips all continued their strong showing in these tests, while the Core 2 Duo E6400 performed similarly to AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4600+.