Intel Core i9 (Gulftown) - 6 cores, 32 nm: hands-on review 

Real-world tests - Photoshop, file compression, encryption

Another benchmark was to perform 15 operations on a 38 megapixel image in Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Most of the filters and image transformations in Photoshop are not divided into multiple threads. More important than pure computing performance is memory bandwidth, especially witch such large images. Our Gulftown had its memory bandwidth limited by an early version of the BIOS, but was still ahead in the Core i5 test.

File compression and encryption

We tested simultaneous file compression and AES encryption. One of the few software applications that already use the AES-NI instructions is the latest version of WinZip. When creating archives In WinZIP 14, you can choose the compression type, encryption type and strength.

Simply select any AES encryption – hardware-based encryption acceleration will work immediately if you have an AES-NI enabled processor.

In encryption-free compression, Gulftown is not much faster than Core i7. In addition, WinZip compresses using a maximum of two threads, so the Gulftown’s entire advantage is related to its greater third-level cache capacity. When you turn the encryption on, Gulftown’s advantage becomes evident. Enabling encryption on non-AES processors results in compression times longer by 160-200%. On Gulftown, this causes compression to take 120% longer. Let us remember that in addition to encryption, the processor has to deal with file-packing – in typical cryptographic applications the advantage of using AES instructions will be much greater.