Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700

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.

There were no real performance improvements in our multithreaded MP3 encoding test.

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 Core 2 Extreme QX6700 chip was pretty slow when it came to decoding MP3’s into WAV format. We fixed the performance issues by allocating one or two of the four cores to the application.