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

Content Creation Performance

For "Content Creation" performance we use two benchmarks - the new Content Creation Winstone 2003 and Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002. Since SYSMark isn't the best for comparing AMD and Intel CPUs, the focus here should be on Content Creation Winstone 2003, so we start with a description of the benchmark from its creators, VeriTest:

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when running top, Windows-based, 32-bit, multimedia content creation applications on Windows 2000 (SP2 or higher), Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows XP. Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 uses the following applications:

Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0
Adobe® Premiere® 6.0
Macromedia® Director 8.5.1
Macromedia® Dreamweaver 4
Microsoft® Windows MediaTM Encoder 7.01.00.3055
Netscape® 6.2.3
NewTek's LightWave® 7.5
Sonic Foundry® Sound Forge® 6.0

Following the lead of real users, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 keeps multiple applications open at once and switches among those applications. Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 is a single large test that runs the above applications through a series of scripted activities and returns a single score. Those activities focus on what we call "hot spots," periods of activity that make your PC really work--the times where you're likely to see an hourglass or a progress bar

Content Creation Performance Content Creation Winstone 2003 Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz HT Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.50GHz AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz) AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz) Barton Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz AMD Athlon XP 2700+ (2.167GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.083GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8AGHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.6AGHz AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz AMD Athlon XP 1500+ (1.33GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.5GHz 49.5 48.6 46.8 45.3 43.7 42 41.6 40.9 40.6 40.4 40.1 39.1 38.1 37.1 35.5 34.3 33.5 33 32.8 32.5 31.8 31.4 30.6 30.5 29.7 29.5 29.2 28.4 27.9 27.3 26.5 | 0 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 59

A predominantly multimedia based benchmark, we see that the added L2 cache doesn't help AMD at all and the old 2800+ manages to outperform the new Barton based 3000+. In the end, the Pentium 4 comes out on top by a decent margin.

The important thing to take away from this CPU scaling graph is to note how well the Pentium 4 fared after the move to the Northwood core (look at the 2000 mark on the graph). The performance gap between the Pentium 4 and Athlon XP seems to be growing in favor of Intel, as is evident by the increasing differential towards the end of the graph.