Clock rate and dual-core architecture rule the ball in this test, apparently in equal proportions.
Data Compression
A very interesting test. Considering that all tested processors were roughly equal in bandwidth of the CPU bus and memory speed, and the fact that data compression software is extra sensitive to this particular parameter, the results should have been quite close. (The only exception is Pentium D 805 with the FSB frequency of only 533 MHz QP.) It is exactly what has happened here. If we take a look at the details, we see that Pentium D 805 has ended up almost tying Celeron 430. Moreover, such is the case in both subtests despite the fact that one benchmark application (7-Zip) supports multi-core processors, while Celeron 430 doesn't have a second core. Probably, Celeron was able to compensate for the lack of the extra core with a higher bandwidth of the CPU bus. Whereas Pentium D 915 has most likely won due to its L2 cache size, which, after all, amounts to a total of 4 megabytes...
OCR
The fact that Athlon 64 X2 3800+ has scored low is an indirect confirmation of a long-speculated hypothesis that ABBYY FineReader's code is just not working well with AMD's processors. Most likely, it cannot identify that they have certain sets of additional instructions. Pentium E2140 has produced shocking results. Is it possible that having two cores can actually hinder the batch recognition process?! Very strange software, indeed. However, it has become popular in its application area, so we just have to live with it...
Audio Encoding
An old test that doesn't support multi-core functionality in any of its subtests. The test is traditionally slightly biased against the NetBurst architecture and, as it turns out, still favors Conroe core even in a most cut-down version over the K8.
Video Encoding
Once again, we observe the situation where dual-core CPUs are way ahead of the single-core ones regardless of architecture.
Games
Comparing Celeron 420 vs. Pentium E2140 we see a clear example of how modern games support dual-core design, and support it quite well.
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