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
Video Effects Rendering Performance
We added two benchmarks to our suite when we reviewed the Pentium 4 2.53GHz: Adobe After Effects 5.5 and NewTek's Lightwave 7.5. These two make good examples of what heavy SSE2 optimizations can bring to the Pentium 4. You'll remember from the original discussions of the Pentium 4's architecture, many criticized Intel's decision to move to an essentially weaker x87 FP execution setup in favor of putting great faith in the adoption of SSE2. The adoption of the instruction set has been going well but as you can tell by most of our 3D rendering and other FP intensive benchmarks, the Pentium 4 is only now becoming competitive because of its high clock speeds.
With AMD's Opteron and the next-generation Athlon scheduled to receive support for Intel's SSE2 instructions as well, the assimilation of SSE2 optimizations into as many applications as possible is in the best interests of both CPU giants. If history is any indication however, it will take quite a bit of time to see significant optimizations in place.
Adobe After Effects is one application that has received a high level of SSE2 optimizations as the type of video manipulation the program allows is perfectly suited for SSE2. Let's have a look at the results:
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10.1
10.3
14.6Although the Pentium 4 has a significantly weaker FPU than the Athlon XP, once SSE2 is thrown into the equation the picture changes dramatically. Intel has done a great job of making sure that applications are taking advantage of the Pentium 4's SSE2 instruction set where applicable; this is also good for AMD as it won't be long before the Athlon (Hammer) can take advantage of these optimizations as well.
Again we see that CPU scaling is almost linear for all of the CPUs, with the gap between the AMD and Intel curves existing solely because of SSE2 optimizations. AMD's SSE2 support in Hammer will close that gap but it will also put the Hammer's SSE2 core to the ultimate test. It is also worth noting that once again, due to the streaming nature of the test, L2 cache size has little effect on the overall performance data.
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