AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ EE (65nm)

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.

Audio encoding performance was essentially the same on both of the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ processors, although there was a slight performance advantage on the older 90nm Windsor core - this seems to ring true through the majority of our benchmark scenarios. As with our Xvid encoding test, these results were dominated by the Core 2-based processors from Intel.

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 Brisbane core flagged behind the Windsor core again here.