AMD's Athlon XP: Great performance, poor marketing

MPEG-4 Video Encoding Flask MPEG 352 x 288 AMD Athlon XP 1.53GHz (1800+) AMD Athlon XP 1.47GHz (1700+) AMD Athlon XP 1.40GHz (1600+) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1.33GHz (1500+) AMD Athlon-C 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.5GHz 49.17 47.25 45.53 45 44.35 41.15 39.35 37.36 36.03 34.14 32.85 | 0 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 39 | 49 | 59

Here you can see exactly how important the Palomino core enhancements are to the Athlon XP. The Athlon XP running at 1.4GHz is able to encode our MPEG-1 source file 10% faster than the previous generation Athlon, also at 1.4GHz. Even the 1.33GHz Athlon XP is able to outperform its 1.4GHz brother. This performance increase is mostly due to the Athlon XP's data prefetch which comes in handy with data intensive applications such as MPEG-4 encoding.

The Athlon XP 1.53GHz (1800+) gives the recently announced 2GHz Pentium 4 some hefty competition; it, too holding almost a 10% lead over Intel's flagship.

MPEG-2 Video Encoding Video 2000 AMD Athlon XP 1.53GHz (1800+) AMD Athlon XP 1.47GHz (1700+) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1.40GHz (1600+) AMD Athlon XP 1.33GHz (1500+) Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon-C 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.5GHz 47.57 46.17 44.91 44.76 43.26 43.25 41.62 40.63 40 37.99 36.28 | 0 | 10 | 19 | 29 | 38 | 48 | 57

The standings don't change much when looking at MPEG-2 video encoding performance. The only real difference being that since MPEG-2 encoding isn't as CPU bound with today's processors, the performance differences between the CPUs is vastly reduced. For example, the close to 10% difference between the Athlon XP 1.53GHz (1800+) and Pentium 4 2.0GHz is cut in half in this benchmark.

MP3 Encoding LAME Encoder - Time in Minutes (lower is better) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1.53GHz (1800+) Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz AMD Athlon XP 1.47GHz (1700+) AMD Athlon XP 1.40GHz (1600+) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 1.33GHz (1500+) Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz AMD Athlon-C 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.5GHz 2.75 2.78 2.9 2.92 3.05 3.15 3.22 3.23 3.25 3.43 3.65 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 4

For our MP3 encoding test we used version 3.89 of the Win32 LAME encoder binaries. We took a 170MB wav file and encoded it using the following commandline options: -v -V 0. This created a variable bit rate MP3, varying the bit rates between 160 kbps and 320 kbps. The end result was a 27MB MP3 file that took between 2 and 4 minutes to encode.

The Athlon XP isn't able to dominate as clearly in this benchmark as the Pentium 4 remains quite competitive with all of the new processors. The Palomino core enhancements help the Athlon XP out as the Athlon 1.4GHz processor is 6% slower than the 1.4GHz Athlon XP.