Intel Pentium III 1.2GHz 0.13-micron Tualatin: The Celeron of the Future

Content Creation/Office Performance - SYSMark 2001

SYSMark 2001 is much less of a disk-bound benchmark utility than Winstone 2001 because it focuses on more computational intensive uses of some of the same applications.  The benchmark again is split into two parts, except this time an overall score is produced from the two as well as individual scores.  The Internet Content Creation benchmarks are especially memory bandwidth intensive, while the Office Productivity tests stress memory latency and cache subsystems more than raw bandwidth. 

A good portion of the ICC test consists of encoding an avi in Windows Media Encoder, a very memory bandwidth intensive process.  This penalizes the Pentium III considerably which is not blessed with as much memory bandwidth as its bigger brother.  The Pentium 4’s dual channel RDRAM memory bus provides it with about three times as much memory bandwidth as the Pentium III’s PC133 SDRAM.  In spite of this disadvantage the Pentium III still performs reasonably well at 1.2GHz, offering performance equal to that of a single processor Athlon MP 1.2; not to mention outperforming the Pentium 4 1.3GHz. 

The Athlon has been a strong performer in the Office Productivity suite and slightly distances itself from the Pentium III.  The Tualatin core clearly makes the Pentium III much more competitive than it once was as is evident by the underperforming Pentium III 1GHz. 

Without any truly memory bandwidth intensive tests, the Pentium 4 is unable to offer much of an advantage over the Pentium III at such low clock speeds.  Remember that the Pentium 4 requires a clock speed advantage to shine courtesy of its NetBurst architecture, with these clock speeds the potential of the architecture is not fully realized thus making the Pentium III much more attractive at a much lower clock speed.  Again, Intel really doesn’t want people purchasing this CPU.

The overall performance scene as described by SYSMark places the Pentium III 1.2GHz just under the Athlon 1.2 and above the Pentium 4 1.3.  Not too bad, but it’s just too late to save the Pentium III.  By this time next year the Pentium III will be a distant memory replaced by a Pentium 4 with a little friend named Jackson.