For us, it was difficult to find personal productivity applications, except for maybe pure rendering programs, that could take advantage of 4 cores. For this reason we decided on three different scenes to test multitasking in Windows XP Professional. The first scene of megatasking has all four of the following applications running at the same time:

• Mainconcept H.264 Encode: Conversion from DV to H.264 High definition video ECS factory tour - DV 16,836 frames;
• DVD Shrink 3.2: backup of film Fahrenheit 9/11; compress to 2000 Mbytes;
• Sony Vegas+DVD 7.0b: Video and Audio Benchmarking;
• POV-Ray 3.7: CPU rendering benchmark

The second graph shows the improvement the systems had with parallel execution of the programs. It is interesting to see how much Quad FX systems were able to benefit when performing the tasks simultaneously.

For this scene of megatasking, we conducted the tests using a different method. Applications were executed in sequence one minute after the application before it. This was done in order to simulate the behavior of a user. We used the following applications in this scene:

• Conversion AutoGordianKnot - converrt to Divx 6.11 backup of Fahrenheit 9/11;
• 1 minuto wait- test with Photoshop: convert from pdf to 127 jpeg images at the resolution of 2816x2112 pixel;
• 1 minuto wait- zip 12,912 files in windows, total file size is 1.79 Gbytes;
• 1 minuto wait- antivirus scan of 12,912 files, total size is 1.79 Gbytes;
• 1 minuto wait- itunes conversion from MP3 192 Kbit to 34 file Wav, total file size of 1.46

In the case of the second megatasking scene, scalability for the most part was aligned between the processors. The 1 minute start after each application before the next played in favor of dual cores, however, it still did not have as much performance improvement as 4 cores when switching to parallel execution.

The third and final megatasking scene was without doubt the most complex. In the background we left playing an H.264 video, therefore always stressing the core and memory subsystem. The applications were run at the same time for our testing:

• conversion AutoGordianKnot - convert to Divx 6.11 backup of Fahrenheit 9/11;
• Mainconcept H.264 Encode: Conversoin from DV to H.264 High definition video ECS factory tour - DV 16,836 frames
• Zip compression of 12,912 files, total file sizei 1.79 Gbytes;
• Antivirius scan of 12,912 files, total file size 1.79 Gbytes;
• Sony Vegas+DVD 7.0b: Video and Audio Benchmarking

The third scene turned out to be extremely interesting. The larger the clocks get for the Quad FX platform’s processors, the higher their performance gets. The two Intel Quad core solutions perform the tasks in the same time they would have running all of the tasks alone. Obviously the H.264 film running in the background was a major source for decreasing performance in the tests.