Introduction

The old equation of performance has once again been bumped closer and closer towards Moore’s law. When will we see an end to the silicon manufacturing process?

PERFORMANCE = CLOCK SPEED x Operations / cycle

For a while now, AMD and Intel have taken wild swings at one another with common result, a faster chip for consumers. Intel has constantly broken the speed barrier producing chips with speeds unmatched. However, AMD always counters Intel with CPUs that match or rival the performance of Intel’s newest chips. Who holds the upper-hand? This I cannot say but today, we have Intel’s newest chip, the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz processor and we are going to throw it into a whole lot of benchmarks!

Test System INTEL

• Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz
• Intel D850EMV2
• Samsung  PC800 40ns 256MB RDRAM
• MSI GeForce4 Ti4600 128MB DDR
• Maxtor 40GB 7200RPM HDD
• Windows XP Pro
• DirectX 8.1
• nVidia Detonator XP v30.82

Test System INTEL

• Intel Pentium 4 2.2 GHz
• Intel D850MV
• Kingston  PC800 45ns 256MB RDRAM
• MSI GeForce4 Ti4600 128MB DDR
• Maxtor 40GB 7200RPM HDD
• Windows XP Pro
• DirectX 8.1
• nVidia Detonator XP v30.82

Test System AMD

• AMD 2100+ “Thoroughbred”
• Gigabyte 7VRXP KT333
• Corsair PC3000 Cas2 512MB DDR
• MSI GeForce4 Ti4600 128MB DDR
• Quantum 40GB 7200RPM HDD
• Windows XP Pro
• DirectX 8.1
• nVidia Detonator XP v30.82

Testing Procedures And Software