AMD's Athlon XP 3000+: Barton cuts it close

Video Encoding Performance - Windows Media Encoder 9.0

For our next video encoding test we took Windows Media Encoder 9.0 and encoded the same chapter from the Star Wars Episode I DVD into a 2Mbps VBR WMV file using Media Encoder's built in 2Mbps DVD VBR settings. The time reported is in minutes to encode, lower being better obviously:

Windows Media 9 Encoding Performance Converting DVD to 2Mbps VBR - Lower is Better Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz HT Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz) AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz) Barton AMD Athlon XP 2700+ (2.167GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.083GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.50GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8AGHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 1500+ (1.33GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6AGHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.5GHz 8.13 9.20 9.95 10.03 10.23 10.33 10.37 10.65 10.88 11.30 11.32 11.77 12.28 12.60 12.63 12.63 13.08 13.53 13.93 14.02 14.03 14.55 14.58 15.13 15.22 15.33 15.77 16.33 16.90 17.08 18.28 | 0 | 4 | 7 | 11 | 15 | 18 | 2

Although the performance advantage isn't as severe, we still see the Pentium 4 doing very well in this encoding test. The performance boost from Hyper-Threading is still significant, and as we explained earlier, the lack of temporal locality in this sort of a usage model keeps the added L2 cache from letting the 3000+ outperform even its 2800+ predecessor.