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

We'll open up the barrage of benchmarks with a new entry from Ziff Davis Media/eTesting Labs: Content Creation Winstone 2002. This benchmark mixes a lot of the classic Winstone tests with somewhat of a SYSMark flavor, let us explain. The benchmark runs through a variety of content creation tasks:

Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1
Adobe Premiere 6.0
Macromedia Director 8.5
Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055
Netscape Navigator 6/6.01
Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184)

...and performs a number of simultaneous tasks designed to simulate the power content creation user. The addition of Windows Media Encoder to the benchmark foray increases the stress on the processor and memory subsystems however we are not 100% sure as to whether or not this build of WME takes advantage of the Athlon XP's SSE instructions or not.

Content Creation Performance Content Creation Winstone 2002 Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz (Northwood) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2AGHz (Northwood) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz 33.7 33.7 32.9 31.5 31.5 30.3 30.2 29.1 28.2 27.3 | 0 | 7 | 13 | 20 | 27 | 34 | 40

It's clear that the Northwood couldn't have come at a better time as the XP 2000+ is about 11% faster than the old Pentium 4 running at 2GHz. The added cache results in a 4% boost for the Pentium 4 and the increase in clock speed keeps the processor competitive with the Athlon XP. It's interesting to note that only a 4% performance boost is realized from the addition of 256KB of L2 cache in this test which could be caused by the disk dependent nature of the CCWS2002 test. This is one thing we do like about all of the Winstone benchmarks as they are usually very characteristic of the way most of us use our systems in that we are often bottlenecked by disk performance.

Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2001 Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz (Northwood) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2AGHz (Northwood) AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz 239 228 224 222 219 212 212 202 198 187 | 0 | 48 | 96 | 143 | 191 | 239 | 287

Last year, with the AMD SSE patch the Athlon XP took the lead in the Internet Content Creation tests of SYSMark 2001 but now with the introduction of Northwood the lead has been restored. The 2.2GHz Pentium 4 holds less than a 5% advantage over the new Athlon XP 2000+ making the two quite competitive with each other.

Here we see that the additional cache resulted in a 7.5% increase for the Pentium 4 when we compare the 2GHz to the new 2A CPU. The ICC SYSMark 2001 suite is far less bottlenecked by the I/O subsystem than Content Creation Winstone 2001 which explains the difference.