Intel's Pentium 4 2.4GHz: Taking the Lead

MP3 Encoding Performance Lame MP3 Encoder 3.91 -v -V 0 Time in Minutes to Encode 170MB .wav File

Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) AMD Athlon 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 1.8 1.9 1.9 1.9 2.1 2.1 2.1 2.3 2.3 2.3 2.6 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3

There is about a 5 - 7% performance difference between the Pentium 4 2.4GHz and the Athlon XP 2100+ in the MP3 encoding test. Luckily MP3 encoding has become much less of a CPU hog courtesy of much more robust CPUs compared to what was out when the codec first started gaining footing among music fans.

Unlike the MPEG-4 encoding chart we are beginning to see some signs of performance leveling off as clock speed increases. We could be running into a bottleneck elsewhere in the system, not necessarily within the CPU.