Vishera Review

Posted 10/22/2012 at 9:01pm | by Gordon Mah Ung

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AMD has been pushing an OpenCL-based version of Handbrake as a benchmark but the beta was available to us at presstime. Instead, we stuck to the publically available 0.9.8 version which is heavily multi-threaded. We took the decrypted contents of the Blu-ray Super Troopers and timed how long it would take to convert the file to ah H.264 file using the high-profile setting. This test shows us that whatever silicon changes AMD made to Vishera, they paid off. There’s a pretty sizeable performance difference between Bulldozer and Vishera that can’t be explained just by clock speeds. Ivy Bridge also has a good showing but Vishera easily out paces it. Bulldozer, however, is pulling up the rear.

Winner: Vishera.

We’ve been using TechArp.com’s X264 HD 5.0.1 benchmark to measure performance on new PCs. The test does two passes using the freeware x264 encoding library. The first pass is seemingly a little more sensitive to clock speeds and memory bandwidth rather than just pure core count. A higher frame rate is better and the Vishera pulls out ahead of the other two chips. Again, Ivy Bridge doesn’t do bad at all but it is faster than the older Bulldozer chip.

Winner: Vishera

The second pass in TechARP’s X264 HD 5.0.1 benchmark is more sensitive to core count and the hips stack up the way we’d expect them to given the number of cores in each. Although, we are seeing two things here: the first is how efficient those Ivy Bridge cores are even up against the eight-core Bulldozer part. The second: The changes AMD made to the Piledriver cores pay off well in encoding tests.

Winner: Vishera

Vishera has thus far won all of the encoding tests where core count matters. Would that translate into our punishing Premiere Pro CS6 benchmark? Flat out no. For this test, we use Adobe’s awesomely fast Premiere Pro CS6, feed it several 1080p videos shot with an EOS 5D MkII and encode it as a Blu-ray video. The video features 1080p video with moving picture-in-picture streams of 1080p moving across the frame. It’s a severe nut buster for even the heftiest of CPUs. We use the Maximum Render option and set it to encode using the host CPU rather than the CUDA-based GPU that we have installed. Interestingly, the Ivy Bridge part kicked the holy hell out of both AMD parts. The Vishera part did markedly better but still was a distant second. The performance of the Bulldozer was so bad, we ran several additional times to see if we had somehow misconfigured our encode. In fact, the performance of the Ivy Bridge part was so fast, we also retested it multiple times to ensure that we hadn’t accidentally rendered the project on the GeForce GTX 580 (which, by the way, smokes the CPUs.)

Winner: Ivy Bridge

We’ve long been using Proshow Producer to gauge CPU and system performance. The latest iteration supports GPU accelerated previews, but for rendering, it’s all about the CPU. The current engine seems to top out at four threads though and adding additional core or Hyper-Threading doesn’t help much. Why do we use it? The truth is that very few applications will soak up the number of cores and threads offered by a Vishera or six-core Sandy Bridge-E chip so we consider this a good way to illustrate performance that you’d get on a typical application. Hey, it could be worse—the vast majority of apps still don’t use more than a single-thread. The efficiency that we’ve been seeing from the Ivy Bridge cores pay off again as it moves past both AMD chips. It’s not a killing, but enough that there is a clear winner.

Winner: Ivy Bridge.

Stitch.Efx 2.0 is another of our new benchmarks. We picked it because it’s a real-world application and actually offers an interesting take on threading. First, we take around 200 images shot with a Canon EOS 7D on a GigaPan motorized head. That’s roughly 1.9GB of image files. The images are then fed into Stich.Efx 2.0 where they are stitched into a giant gigapixel image. The first third of the render where the images are stitched together is single-threaded. The final two-thirds where the image is blended together is multi-threaded. We’ve found that this test generally favors clock speed and a quad-core with Hyper-Threading seems to offer the optimal foot print. The efficiency of the Ivy Bridge chips, which we’ve seen drub the FX chips all day, again shows its head here. There is a silver lining though: again, Whatever changes AMD did to the chip are paying off as the advantage Vishera has over Bulldozer can’t be explained by pure clock speeds.

Winner: Ivy Bridge.

Click the next page for the final test and complete benchmark chart.