AMD's Athlon XP 2100+ The Last of the Palominos

General Usage Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002

Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) AMD Athlon 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 165 158 153 150 144 141 138 136 132 125 | 0 | 33 | 66 | 99 | 132 | 165 | 198

The performance picture changes considerably in the Office Productivity test suite. Only the Northwoods are able to outperform the Athlon XP 2000+ and 2100+ in this test, the additional L2 cache helps offset the long pipeline penalties of the Pentium 4 among other inefficiencies when it comes to executing conventional integer code.

Here we see that the Athlon XP has the ability to scale quite well in this benchmark even as clock speeds increase beyond 1.73GHz (2100+). Additional L2 cache will be necessary however to bridge the gap between the Athlon XP and the Northwood, which could point at a reason for outfitting the Thoroughbred core with more cache.

Overall System Performance SYSMark 2002

Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz AMD Athlon 1.4GHz 219 210 186 186 181 176 171 163 160 150 | 0 | 44 | 88 | 131 | 175 | 219 | 263

The overall performance score is derived from the ICC and Office Productivity tests and thus there are no surprises here.

The Pentium 4 and Athlon XP performance curves run pretty much along the same path until the Pentium 4 gets the additional L2 cache courtesy of the Northwood core.