18. WinRAR (Data Compression)

Alexander Roshal's WinRAR is a well-known program, used to compress stored data to space, or for transmission over networks.

This is a case where the Turion 64's integrated memory controller, which reduces access latency, really comes to the fore. In addition, performance also scales nicely on both the Mobile Sempron and Turion 64 processors when faster RAM is installed.

DivX Encoding With Auto Gordian Knot (MPEG-4 Encoding)

The more efficiently a video codec works, the lower the system and resource demands that playback and, above all, encoding or decoding will make. That's why these types of programs so often invoke CPU instructions directly, so make them operate as quickly as possible.

For both AMD CPUs performance scales upward with faster RAM. Doubling the size of the L2 cache, as in the case of the Pentium M processor we tested, delivered no measurable performance improvements over the CPU with only 1 MB of L2 cache. But this benchmark is also hampered by a hard disk that's pretty slow in comparison to drives used on desktop machines (as is the case with most small notebook drives that rotate more slowly than their bigger brethren on the desktop).