Intel Unveils Sandy Bridge: Core i7 2600K, i5 2500K, i5 2400, i3 2100 CPUs

iTunes 10

iTunes is a free application for your Mac or PC. It organizes and plays your digital music and video on your computer. It keeps all your content in sync. And its a store on your computer, iPod touch, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV that has everything you need to be entertained. Anywhere. Anytime.

In this benchmark we take a 640MB .WAV file and convert it to a 160kbp/s .mp3.

iTunes is not a heavily threaded app as you can see in the screen shot above. At most it uses two CPU cores for converting to mp3, so clock speed and an efficient architecture reigns supreme. Intel clearly has a dominant lead here with only the QX6700 being the only Intel CPU overtaken by an AMD processor. One very interesting comparison is the Core i3 2100 and Core i5 661. The Core i5 661 should be running at 3.45 GHz with two active threads while the i3 2100 has a maximum speed of 3.1GHz. With only 1 second difference it’s clear to see that even a cut down Sandy Bridge has made great strides in performance over Clarkdale.