File Compression
7Zip is free archiving tool and strong alternative to popular WinRAR. Integrated benchmark scripts are used in both 7Zip and WinRAR to test the performance of CPUs with multithreading enabled. One real life test with WinRAR is simulated while measuring the time needed to compress a ~700MB image file. We can see that multithreading support does not work so good like it does in benchmark scripts.
Just like video encoding, AMD's processors seem to love working with archives and show really decent performance levels. Athlon II X2 240 greatly outperforms the Pentium E5200 and is getting really close to Core 2 Duo E8200.
7Zip 32MB
WinRAR 3.9 Benchmark
WinRAR 3.9 compressing