AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.33GHz/1.30GHz

In the interest of time we have omitted the Pentium III and KT133A from the WebMark 2001 comparison.

Without much explanation behind the numbers you can draw a few conclusions right off of the bat.  The 1.33GHz Athlon seems to be equivalent in performance to the 1.3GHz Pentium 4.  The only other times we have seen that occur have been in some games but not in any of the Windows 2000 benchmarks we have been running. 

What does WebMark 2001 do differently than the rest of the benchmarks?  What part of the Pentium 4 architecture does it stress that gives the Pentium 4 such an advantage here over the fastest Athlon?  Let’s find out as we dig a little deeper into the benchmark.

In the B2B portion of the WebMark 2001 benchmark, 37% of the score is derived from the system’s performance when handling 3D Product Visualization tasks that are mostly FPU intensive.  We have seen proof (e.g. MP3 encoding tests) that the Pentium 4’s FPU is strong, but can be weaker than the Athlon’s FPU, which would lead us to believe that the 3D Product Visualization portion of this benchmark would favor the Athlon’s stronger FPU.

A total of 27% of the score comes from SSL & non-SSL web-page loads, which are mostly integer functions.  We have also commonly viewed the Pentium 4 as a relatively poor Integer performer because of its noticeable branch mis-predict penalty. 

XML makes up 21% of the B2B score and Flash Animation composes another 10%, leaving 5% for Image Processing (Java) and Flash Applications.  However we are unable to find clear explanation for the Pentium 4’s performance here.  Let’s keep on digging.

For proof we went to WebMark’s Technology Performance tests, that run the individual technologies that are benchmarked here and give us performance figures in each category.

If you’re wondering why the Pentium 4 did so well in the B2B tests, it’s because 37% of the score is derived from 3D Visualization Performance, and as you can see from the above graph, the Pentium 4 does come out on top in that category.  We noticed similar performance leads in many 3D games as well, indicating some sort of correlation between the two types of 3D applications.

Only 10% of the B2B score came from the Flash Animation performance which was lead by the 1.33GHz Athlon but closely followed by the Pentium 4.

Many won’t argue that XML is a technology to expect to see more and more on the web as it matures, and you also can’t argue that the Athlon and Pentium 4 are very close in their XML performance.  As we mentioned in our original critique of the WebMark 2001 benchmark, you aren’t very likely to notice this type of a performance difference between two processors.  But it is interesting to note how the processors do perform in these situations.