Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz: One step closer

Content Creation/Office Productivity Performance

Although both SYSMark 2001 and Winstone 2001 promise to illustrate performance in multitasking Content Creation and Office Application environments, they go about it in two different ways.  BAPCo constructed SYSMark 2001 to run in real time, meaning that the benchmark actually pauses for user input and runs just as quickly as the tasks would had a normal user been sitting at the keyboard performing all of them.

There is much less of a disk dependence in SYSMark 2001 allowing the performance differences between processors to extend far beyond what we saw in the Winstone scores.  The Internet Content Creation test is very memory bandwidth intensive since a large part of the test is composed of encoding a video using Windows Media Encoder.  The Office Productivity test is a much more intense than Business Winstone and combines conventional office tasks with virus scans and archive compression tasks (e.g. using Winzip). 

As soon as you introduce a bandwidth intensive application into the Content Creation genre the performance standings change considerably.  Unlike Content Creation Winstone, the 1.4GHz Athlon isn’t able to outperform the Pentium 4 1.5 although it comes within 3%.  The Pentium 4 1.8GHz dominates in this test, and the overclocked processor running at 2.0GHz is even more impressive. 

On the Athlon side of things we see that the Athlon MP offers a 4% performance increase over an equally clocked Athlon CPU that uses the Thunderbird core.  So far there doesn’t seem to be too much to look forward to other than a cooler running core, but let’s reserve judgment on that until we’ve seen the entire performance picture.

The Athlon used to be the king of the Office Productivity suite under SYSMark 2001 but at 1.8GHz the Pentium 4 is able to edge the Athlon 1.4 out of the lead position by just under 2%.  At 2GHz the performance advantage extends even further.  Here we see that the Athlon MP isn’t able to separate itself from the regular Athlon at all.

The overall performance crown here goes to the Pentium 4 1.8 whose advantage in the Internet Content Creation tests gives it the 11% performance advantage over the second runner up, the AMD Athlon 1.4GHz processor.  The overall performance advantage of the Palomino core as shown by SYSMark 2001 ends up being 2% but these types of applications aren’t going to be stressing the data prefetch or TLB enhancements of the Athlon MP much at all.