AMD's Athlon XP 3000+: Barton cuts it close

Content Creation Performance (continued)

SYSMark 2002 isn't the world's best CPU benchmark for comparing the Athlon XP to the Pentium 4, but it does still make for a good comparison of processors within a given family. Thus we include it here to compare the Barton core to its predecessors, but first here's a list of the applications found in the Internet Content Creation suite of the benchmark:

Adobe Photoshop® 6.01
Adobe Premiere® 6.0
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.1
Macromedia Dreamweaver 4
Macromedia Flash 5

Internet Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002 Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz HT Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.50GHz AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz) Barton Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2700+ (2.167GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.083GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8AGHz AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6AGHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.5GHz AMD Athlon XP 1500+ (1.33GHz) 419 403 375 361 346 336 334 329 324 302 295 287 280 279 261 258 241 235 228 228 225 225 221 221 216 209 204 202 201 196 195 | 0 | 84 | 168 | 251 | 335 | 419 | 503

Despite the shortcomings of the benchmark, ICC SYSMark 2002 paints a picture very similar to what we saw in Content Creation Winstone 2003. The main difference here is that the Barton core actually gives AMD a relatively decent boost.

Once again we see that the Pentium 4 only becomes competitive above 2GHz (the sub-2GHz Northwoods were left out of the CPU scaling charts for simplicity's sake), but the performance difference between the Pentium 4 and Athlon XP is somewhat exaggerated by this particular benchmark. What SYSMark is good for however is comparing CPUs within a particular microprocessor family, in which case you can see how much of a benefit the added L2 cache of the 3000+ gives the Athlon XP by that spike at the very end of the green line.