Athlon 64 X2: New Memory Dividers and Multitasking Performance

Multitasking with Adobe Photoshop CS

Intel has done a great job of putting together a number of benchmarks that put real applications in real world usage scenarios. Despite the validity of most of their benchmarks, we don’t use them in our CPU comparisons because of the fact that they are scripted by Intel. But, since we’re not doing an AMD vs. Intel comparison here today, we made use of one of them in particular - their Adobe Photoshop CS benchmark.

Usually, Photoshop benchmarks consist of performing every single filter on an image and recording the time taken by each filter. Intel’s benchmark performs a bunch of filters and image manipulations much like a user would, and keeps track of the total time that the script took to complete.

First off, let’s take a look at the performance of DDR400 vs. DDR480 without anything running in the background, just Photoshop CS:

Time in Seconds (Lower is Better)	DDR400	DDR480
Adobe Photoshop CS	63.263s	63.028s

Although DDR480 is slightly faster than DDR400, it isn’t a tangible performance advantage (less than 1%).
But now to spice things up a bit, let’s look at Photoshop CS performance when we’re listening to a MP3 and encoding a video at the same time. For this particular test, we start up Windows Media Encoder 9 and iTunes, begin encoding our test video, then start playing our single MP3 on repeat and start the Photoshop CS script 5 seconds later.

Time in Seconds (Lower is Better)	DDR400	DDR480
Adobe Photoshop CS + MP3 + WME9	105.773s	98.851s

The end result is far more tangible this time around, with DDR480 completing the Photoshop task in 6.5% less time than the same system with DDR400.

We used our Windows Media Encoder test here because in our original article, the WME test itself saw no benefit from DDR480, much like Photoshop CS. But putting the two together and tossing in some background music changed the picture; it changed things enough that we’d actually recommend using higher bandwidth memory in this case.