AMD's 0.13-micron Thoroughbred - Cool but Slipping at 2200+
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 10, 2002 2:55 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Internet Content Creation & General Usage Performance
With this review we continue to use SYSMark 2002; SYSMark 2002 can be considered to be a much more memory bandwidth intensive version of the Winstone tests. The benchmark is split into two parts, Internet Content Creation which deals with content creation applications (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc...) and Office Productivity which is more general usage oriented (Word, Excel, Netscape, Anti-Virus, etc...).
The 2002 update changes things around a bit; first of all the benchmark's total scores are arrived at differently than in the 2001 benchmark. Windows Media Encoder no longer accounts for close to half of the Internet Content Creation test, rather only about 10%. There is also no need for a special Athlon XP SSE patch as the 2002 suite uses a version of the encoding dll that properly detects SSE support on all Palomino cores as well as Pentium 4 cores.
The rest of the benchmark is much more evenly distributed and it is much more memory bandwidth intensive than the old benchmark. The Internet Content Creation tests on average use about 600MB/s of bandwidth vs 300MB in SYSMark 2001. The Office Productivity tests are still stuck at around 580MB/s of memory bandwidth.
For more information on the tests and the applications used consult this whitepaper provided by BAPCo.
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155This is quite possibly the most important benchmark when it comes to measuring the way the majority of users interact with their PCs on a daily basis. Differences greater than 10% are generally noticeably in the real world and taking that into account you'll see that the Athlon XP 2200+ actually falls just outside that marker when compared to Intel's fastest. The performance is competitive but remember that we're not dealing with a huge speed bump since we last investigated the Athlon XP's performance.
As you can see from the CPU scaling chart, it will simply take a higher clocked Athlon XP to continue to be competitive with the Pentium 4 under most general use applications. This will change once Prescott arrives with its 1MB L2 cache but by then the highest end Athlon processor will have the benefit of an on-die memory controller which should help AMD get by with a smaller cache.
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SYSMark's Internet Content Creation suite is more of a niche test focusing on those users who are constantly using their PC to produce HTML, Flash, Video and other similar types of content. The performance here is greatly skewed towards the Pentium 4 which definitely excels at this type of usage.
A relatively flat scaling curve from the Athlon XP indicates that we'll need to see some architectural changes before the processor family can catch up to Intel here. A 512KB L2 cache Athlon XP would help but what's truly necessary here is Hammer.
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