AMD's Athlon XP 2000+ vs Intel's 0.13-micron Northwood

Media Encoding Performance

Intel has always touted the Pentium 4's strengths as a processor for media encoding, and compared to the Pentium III it is indeed a much improved processor. It is the Athlon that gives it a run for its money.

For starters we used Xmpeg 4.2a (based off of the Flask MPEG 0.60 preview) video encoder along with the latest Divx 4.12 codec to encode Chapter 40 from the Star Wars Episode I DVD in its entirety to a 720 x 480 Divx file complete with MP3 audio at 29.97 fps (NTSC). We chose Chapter 40 because it contains one of the more complex MPEG-2 streams on the DVD, with most of the video being > 6Mbps streams.

MPEG-4 Encoding Performance Xmpeg 4.2a - Divx 4.12 Codec - YUV2 720 x 480 - DD5.1 Sound - 29.97 fps Frames Encoded per Second Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz (Northwood) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2AGHz (Northwood) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz 29.3 27.6 27.4 27.1 26.9 26.1 25.9 25.8 25.1 24 | 0 | 6 | 12 | 18 | 23 | 29 | 35

The additional cache of the Northwood core does not improve performance much (a 533MHz FSB would have done much more) but the 2.2GHz processor is still able to top the charts. The latest version of the divx codec is quite accommodating to both the Athlon XP and Pentium 4, but the 2.2GHz Pentium 4 pulls away with the 6% lead here. The performance advantage isn't huge but it's there.

MP3 Encoding Performance Lame MP3 Encoder -V 0 Time to Encode 170MB .wav File Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz (Northwood) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2AGHz (Northwood) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz 2.52 2.55 2.67 2.75 2.75 2.78 2.9 2.92 3.15 3.23 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 4

Just like video encoding, MP3 audio encoding also fails to benefit from any additional L2 cache of the Northwood core. The two chart toppers are again very close in performance to one another.