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

General Usage Performance

Although not as performance-critical as content creation applications, it is the set of every day applications like Office and other general usage programs that the majority of users find themselves interacting with the most, thus performance here is also very important.

We start with VeriTest's Business Winstone 2002:

The Business Winstone tests are "market-centered" tests. Business applications are the popular applications employed by most users every day.

Five Microsoft Office 2002 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word)
Microsoft Project 2000
Lotus Notes
WinZip 8.0
Norton AntiVirus
Netscape Communicator

General Usage/Office Performance Business Winstone 2002 AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz) Barton AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2700+ (2.167GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.083GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz) Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz HT Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.50GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz AMD Athlon XP 1500+ (1.33GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8AGHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6AGHz Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.5GHz 39.9 38 37.5 36.9 35.5 34.9 34.7 33.6 33.5 33 32.8 32.8 32.3 31.7 31.6 31 30.2 30.1 30.1 29.7 29.7 28.7 27.3 26 24.5 24.4 23.8 23.4 22.6 21.9 21.3 | 0 | 8 | 16 | 24 | 32 | 40 | 48

The Athlon XP does extremely well in business/general usage applications as is made evident by Business Winstone 2002. The primary reason for this is that these applications are predominantly integer applications, meaning their code makes use of the CPU's integer execution units. By nature, integer code has a great deal of conditional branches, mostly in the form of equality testing (e.g. if x = 0 then y) which can greatly penalize a long-pipeline architecture such as that employed by the Pentium 4. The Northwood core helped the Pentium 4 keep up in these situations but overall, the Athlon XP is still the best bang for your buck here and the highest performer with the XP 3000+.