Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz: Does the prophecy hold true?

Content Creation Performance

As we mentioned in our description of the benchmark, SYSMark 2001 has an Average Response Time metric that it reports as well as a classic rating.  First we see that the Internet Content Creation portion of the SYSMark 2001 benchmark is heavily dominated by the Pentium 4 processor.  The reasoning behind this is simple; a large portion of this test is based on a Windows Media Encoder benchmark that happens to be quite bandwidth intensive.  As we have seen in our synthetic tests, the term bandwidth might as well be synonymous with the Pentium 4.  Even the Pentium III enjoys a slight advantage over the Athlon in this test as it does have a greater amount of L2 cache bandwidth. 

It is interesting to note that the difference between the 1GHz processors of last year and the 1.7GHz processor of today is a mere 1 second in response time.  While it is true that when added up over the course of hundreds of operations this 1 second difference translates into minutes and possibly hours of saved time, it definitely provides a different perspective on how precious such a small unit of time can be.

The Internet Content Creation ratings maintain the same standings as the average response time results we just looked at, which makes sense.  Since this is the first time we have used this suite it is appropriate for us to explain some of the tests that are involved in the benchmark.  Luckily BAPCo provides the summary we’re looking for (taken from http://www.bapco.com/sysmark2001overview.htm):

Internet Content Creation Scenario: In this scenario, a Web developer creates two web pages for an Extreme Sports company selling a Kayaking product. Images are manipulated in Photoshop and web animations created in Flash are used on a web page created by Dreamweaver. A Kayaking promotional video clip is assembled in Premiere. The page also has links to a video clip that was encoded using Windows Media Encoder.

Adobe* Photoshop* 6.0
The user opens a high definition picture and runs a few sample filters, experiments with the size and orientation, changes pixel/inch ratio, fades the image, adds a border, saves the result image under jpeg format and prints the resultant image.

Adobe* Premiere* 6.0
The user assembles a promotional video for a Kayaking product from stock footage. Various effects are added to make it compelling. The video is then exported in a compressed format.

Macromedia Dreamweaver 4
The user creates two web pages for the online extreme sports company. The first page gives an overview of four kayaking products. The second page gives the details on a specific product. The Flash animation, Photoshop images and the encoded video are imported from the respective applications.

Macromedia Flash 5
The user starts with an FLA file. The following operations are then performed: Step through the desired frames; go to the Library and locate the desired symbol to delete; Import and trace bitmaps; Flip and rotate images; Move, scale and group images. Finally export the movie.

Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7
The user takes a video clip and encodes it in the background.