Intel's Pentium 4 3.06GHz: Hyper-Threading on Desktops

Business & Content Creation Performance

For our Business & Content Creation tests we turned to the new Business Winstone 2002 benchmark as well as Content Creation Winstone 2002. The latest version of Content Creation Winstone (2003) is not yet ready for prime time as there are still a number of bugs that need to be worked out before we'll start using the benchmark, until then we'll make do with what we have.

The new Business Winstone test is pleasantly welcome as we haven't had a new Business Winstone test in almost 2 years and it's arguably more important than any content creation test as there are more users of Word and Outlook than there are of Macromedia Director; in any case, we include both sets of scores:

Content Creation Performance Content Creation Winstone 2002 Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz) Intel Pentium 4-HT 3.06GHz AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz FSB) Intel Pentium 4 1.8AGHz (400MHz FSB) 45.4 44.8 43.9 43.3 42.6 39.4 39.3 37.3 35.4 34.8 32.5 | 0 | 9 | 18 | 27 | 36 | 45 | 54

Here we see one of the only situations where enabling Hyper-Threading makes things slower; the 7% performance hit pushes the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 down to below the Athlon XP 2800+ and Pentium 4 2.80GHz. The performance advantage those two have over the HT-enabled P4 is negligible at around 3% so you're better off leaving HT enabled and just dealing with a loss here.

General Usage/Office Performance Business Winstone 2002 AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz) Intel Pentium 4-HT 3.06GHz AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz FSB) Intel Pentium 4 1.8AGHz (400MHz FSB) 34.0 33.6 32.9 32.0 30.9 30.7 30.2 29.6 28.5 26.5 25.3 | 0 | 7 | 14 | 20 | 27 | 34 | 41

Hyper-Threading doesn't hurt the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 here but the Athlon XP 2800+ is able to pull slightly ahead thanks to NVIDIA's latest IDE drivers for nForce2; remembering back to our nForce2 Part II article, the nForce2 chipset improves performance here by around 10%.