Intel Introduces 533MHz FSB CPUs - Pentium 4 2.53GHz

Video Effects Rendering Performance

We've added two new benchmarks to our suite for this comparison: 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:

Video Effects Rendering Performance Adobe After Effects 5.5 Time in Minutes to Complete Rendering Tasks Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4B 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) 10.1 10.3 10.5 11.3 12.2 12.7 14.0 15.1 15.4 15.5 16.6 17.9 | 0 | 4 | 7 | 11 | 14 | 18 | 21

The After Effects results paint a completely different picture from what we're used to seeing when it comes to FP performance with the Pentium 4 and Athlon XP. Even the Athlon XP 2100+ is beat by Intel's Willamette based Pentium 4 running at 1.8GHz.

While the performance here can't be generally applied to all sorts of video editing/effects rendering packages, After Effects is widely used and for those users that depend on the highest performance in the application the Pentium 4 is your best bet.

What will be the most interesting is to see how the Opteron/next-generation Athlon perform under this and other SSE2 optimized applications.