Intel Celeron 1.7GHz - Pentium 4 Powered

Media Encoding Performance

What once was a very CPU intensive task is now fairly trivial. Because of the streaming nature of MP3 encoding, having a larger cache doesn't necessarily result in a tangible increase in performance. The reason we continue to stress MP3 encoding as a CPU benchmark is mainly because of the fact that MP3 encoding usually does play a role in larger projects such as MPEG-4 video encoding where you're ripping audio as well as video.

MP3 Encoding Performance Lame MP3 Encoder 3.91 -v -V 0 Time in Minutes to Encode 170MB .wav File Intel Celeron 1.7 @ 2.26GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz Intel Pentium III 1.2 Intel Celeron 1.2GHz Intel Celeron 1.7GHz AMD Duron 1.3GHz 1.98 2.10 2.30 2.45 2.50 2.55 2.55 2.57 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3

Performance when encoding audio is pretty much a function of clock speed for the Celeron and Pentium 4 since the architectures are identical (minus the cache size differences). Because of this, the overclocked Celeron can take the lead while the 1.7GHz part is on the heels of the Pentium 4. It is worth noting that since MP3 encoding is generally a very floating point intensive process the older Pentium III and Celeron processors do just fine due to their relative strength when it comes to FP tasks.