Related Articles

OpenGL Performance: Quake 3 Arena

Q3A Timedemo 1

Quake 3 Arena “Demo 1” From the above Quake 3 test, the Pentium 4 2.2 Ghz is ahead of the AMD Athlon XP especially in lower resolutions.

Direct3D Performance - DirectX 8: 3D Mark 2001

3DMarks2001 1280x1024 x16 & x32

3DMarks2001 1600x1200 x16 & x32

MadOnion’s 3Dmark2001 Benchmark test

3D Mark 2001 reveals the Direct3D performance from DirectX 8.1. In this benchmark, the Pentium 4 2.2 Ghz positioned well ahead of the Athlon XP 2000+ at both . It used to be that 3DNow! was a much better instruction set than SSE but perhaps Intel has optimized SSE2 for to access the directx driver more efficiently.

MP3 Audio-Encoding: Lame MP3

Lame 100MB WAV To MP3

With the Lame MP3 Encoder, a 100 MB sound file in WAV format is converted to MPEG-1 Layer 3 formats under Windows XP. The chart above shows that the new Pentium 4 2.2 Ghz has a small 1-second lead over AMD Athlon XP 2000+. Unless you are a sound engineer, Intel’s small advantage is hardly noticeable to the home user.

Video-Encoding MPEG-4: Flask Mpeg and DivX

MPEG-4 Encoding

Similar results for MPEG4 encoding, Intel again slightly on top…noticing a trend?

SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks: CPU, Memory and Multimedia

Intel Pentium 4 2.2 GHz

CPU, Memory & Multimedia Marks

AMD Athlon XP 2000+

CPU, Memory & Multimedia Marks

With the SiSoft Sandra Benchmark 2001, AMD Athlon XP 2000+ has a slight lead against the P4 in the CPU benchmark. However, the memory benchmark proved that PC800 RDRAM is much much faster that DDR ram. The memory results for the P4 were almost 2x that of the XP 2000+.

Archiving: WinACE 2.04

winACE Benchmark

The archiving test is just to show the day-to-day capabilities of both chips. Compressing files is done all the time by your computer. Here, the results show that the P4 2.2 GHz is once again ahead of the XP 2000+.

Conclusion

The New Pentium 4 Has A Slight Lead over Athlon XP despite the 533 MHz difference! It used to be comparing AMD and Intel chips were like comparing apples to oranges, the difference is huge. Here, the difference is much less obvious and Intel instead of AMD is on the top. Technically both AMD and Intel have advantages over one another, the Palomino core of the AMD Athlon XP can to process more commands at the same time, while Intel's Pentium 4 has a much higher clock speed.

The most visible differences between the two are that Intel is better suited for the future. AMD has already used the 0.18 micron process to its fullest and the only thing for them to do is to go to 0.13 micron. However, Intel has already implemented this technology and has a head start. In addition, Intel has increased the L2-Cache from 256 KB (Willamette core) to 512 KB (Northwood core) and the real performance is seen in the way it handles data from memory to CPU. My recommendation are to wait for Intel’s new 133 MHz FSB CPUs coming out later this year and also see if AMD will come up with a 166 MHz FSB to accommodate the already popular KT333 chipset. With so many new innovations coming out, it is hard to choose. I say wait before you upgrade and see what new goodies these two chip giants come up with.