Intel Introduces 533MHz FSB CPUs - Pentium 4 2.53GHz

Media Encoding Performance

What once was a very CPU intensive task is now fairly trivial. Because of the streaming nature of MP3 encoding, having a larger cache doesn't necessarily result in a tangible increase in performance. The reason we continue to stress MP3 encoding as a CPU benchmark is mainly because of the fact that MP3 encoding usually does play a role in larger projects such as MPEG-4 video encoding where you're ripping audio as well as video.

MP3 Encoding Performance Lame MP3 Encoder 3.91 -v -V 0 Time in Minutes to Encode 170MB .wav File Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4B 2.4GHz 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) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 1.65 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.9 1.9 2.1 2.1 2.1 2.3 2.3 2.6 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3

If you'll notice there is a slight performance boost when going to the 533MHz FSB alone at 2.4GHz. The reason behind this is simple, the application and its working dataset are too small to saturate the memory bus so a higher speed FSB simply lets the Pentium 4 gain better efficiency of the available memory bandwidth.

As we just mentioned, MP3 encoding does play a role in ripping DVDs to highly compressed DiVX 5.0 files since it's usually no fun to watch a movie with no audio and it defeats the purpose of DiVX encoding to use uncompressed audio.

MPEG-4 Encoding Performance Xmpeg 4.5 - Divx 5.0 Codec - YV12 720 x 480 - DD5.1 Sound - 23.95 fps Frames Encoded per Second Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4B 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz 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 32.8 31.3 31.2 29.3 27.9 27.4 27.1 27.0 25.8 25.8 24.3 22.9 | 0 | 7 | 13 | 20 | 26 | 33 | 39

Here the increased FSB doesn't help out too much although the Pentium 4 does still have command of the performance lead here. It will take much more than a die shrink to bring the Athlon XP back to the top of the charts although the processor is still very competitive and a great value for its price.