AMD's 0.13-micron Thoroughbred - Cool but Slipping at 2200+

MP3 Encoding Performance Lame MP3 Encoder 3.91 -v -V 0 Time in Minutes to Encode 170MB .wav File Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4B 2.4GHz AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 1.65 1.70 1.78 1.80 1.85 1.90 1.92 2.07 2.08 2.13 2.28 2.32 2.60 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3

Media encoding of any sort is generally a very CPU intensive task that scales very well with clock speed. The performance standings are fairly self explanatory here, it's the CPU scaling chart that does the majority of the talking however:

We can see the Athlon XP illustrate the beginnings of leveling off in performance, although we'll need another speed grade to truly be sure. A larger L2 cache won't help much here as we're dealing with streaming data from main memory to the CPU and rarely making use of repeated accesses of the same bits of data.