19. Windows Media Encoder (Video Encoding And Processing)

The Windows Media Encoder is necessary whenever conversion into Windows Media Format (.wmv) is needed. This operation is quite compute-intensive, which also makes WME a great tool for benchmarking as well.

Here again, performance for both AMD CPUs scale upward with faster RAM. But a higher core clock rate also has a positive impact. The biggest influence on performance, however, is a big Fullspeed L2 cache as the great results from the Pentium M clearly attest.

Lame MP3 Encoding

Lame is one of the best-known MP3 encoders. It often appears in applications that call on an external MP3 encoder for assistance. In contrast to earlier versions, a thread-optimized version offers marked performance improvements to processors that support hyper threading or dual core architectures.

But neither the Turion 64 nor the Mobile Sempron scaled in any way when equipped with faster memory for this benchmark. The only thing that counts here is high core clock rates, and that's something the Pentium M brings to bear in this case. In addition, the Lame code is optimized for Intel CPUs - a double-whammy working against the AMD processors in this test.