Intel's Pentium 4 2.4GHz: Taking the Lead

SYSMark 2002

With this review we continue to use SYSMark 2002; SYSMark 2002 can be considered to be a much more memory bandwidth intensive version of the Winstone tests. The benchmark is split into two parts, Internet Content Creation which deals with content creation applications (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc...) and Office Productivity which is more general usage oriented (Word, Excel, Netscape, Anti-Virus, etc...).

The 2002 update changes things around a bit; first of all the benchmark's total scores are arrived at differently than in the 2001 benchmark. Windows Media Encoder no longer accounts for close to half of the Internet Content Creation test, rather only about 10%. There is also no need for a special Athlon XP SSE patch as the 2002 suite uses a version of the encoding dll that properly detects SSE support on all Palomino cores as well as Pentium 4 cores.

The rest of the benchmark is much more evenly distributed and it is much more memory bandwidth intensive than the old benchmark. The Internet Content Creation tests on average use about 600MB/s of bandwidth vs 300MB in SYSMark 2001. The Office Productivity tests are still stuck at around 580MB/s of memory bandwidth.

For more information on the tests and the applications used consult this whitepaper provided by BAPCo.

Internet Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002

Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) AMD Athlon 1.4GHz 310 292 279 240 225 224 218 208 206 195 170 | 0 | 62 | 124 | 186 | 248 | 310 | 372

The Pentium 4 platforms have always been favored in this test as the nature of their architecture and the high memory-bandwidth platforms themselves tend to make for good performers in most ICC environments.

The Pentium 4 continues to scale well with the 9% increase in clock speed resulting in close to a 6% boost in performance for the 2.4GHz processor.

General Usage Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002

Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) AMD Athlon 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 168 165 158 153 150 144 141 138 136 132 125 | 0 | 34 | 67 | 101 | 134 | 168 | 202

The introduction of the 2.4GHz Pentium 4 puts the distance between the fastest Athlon XP and the fastest Pentium 4 just at 10% which is the unofficial threshold for being able to notice performance differences in real-world applications.

The Office Productivity performance curves are definitely not as smooth as some of the Content Creation curves we've seen. These applications don't benefit much from a 200MHz increase in clock speed as they are mostly cache, memory and disk I/O dependent so long as you have a fast enough processor.