Cirruslvr,
This is especially for you to recognize your efforts in carrying the SPECstuff discussion with Elmer ;o) Found the link to this article at JC's site ( jc-news.com )
winmag.com _________
Camino's Here, But It's Still Not Faster Than Athlon
November 16, 1999 by Jonathan Blackwood
It's here, finally. Intel's new 820 (Camino) chipset,
that is. I recently had the opportunity to benchmark a
733MHz Pentium III-powered Compaq Deskpro
EN series PC onsite at Compaq's Houston
headquarters. This PC is being announced today to
coincide with Intel's belated rollout of the Camino
chipset, although it won't be available for delivery
until mid-December.
Interestingly, I also have had the opportunity to
benchmark a new Polywell PC powered by AMD's
new 700MHz Athlon processor. Both the Compaq
and the Polywell PCs were running NT, and the
results of our benchmarks are interesting.
The short version: Despite the Pentium III's higher
clock rate, the Athlon-powered Polywell
outperformed the Compaq on 8 of our 12 tests. The
Polywell earned a WinScore mark of 165,
representing 165% of the performance of our
450MHz Gateway Performance 450 reference PC.
The Compaq's WinScore was 160, nothing to be
sneezed at, but surprising when compared to the
Polywell's score.
There are a number of benchmark results that
surprised me. For one thing, the Compaq bested the
Polywell on 2D video throughput, uncached disk
performance, Word performance and AutoCAD
performance.
The Polywell outperformed the Compaq on every
other measure, including those for which Intel has
proclaimed the superiority of the Coppermine
Pentium III/Camino combination. For example, Intel's
SSE instructions are supposed (according to Intel) to
be superior to AMD's 3DNow! instructions. Yet the
Polywell outperformed the Compaq in all of our
benchmarks where these instructions should come
into play, namely our OpenGL, Direct3D and
Photoshop/DeBabelizer tests.
Intel has also pushed the adoption of Rambus
memory, which the 820 chipset supports, owing to its
greater throughput. On our Wintune memory
benchmark, however, the Polywell showed better
memory throughput, at 118% that of the Compaq.
As I've noted in this space before, to be fair to Intel,
there may be other areas, such as what Intel calls
concurrency, where the new Pentium IIIs with the
820 chipset might outperform the Athlon significantly.
If so, it's apparent that our current benchmarks don't
test for these things. Intel says that concurrency will
become increasingly important when dealing with
"streaming data" types, such as audio and video.
Perhaps so, but I have to say, so far I haven't noticed
any specific weakness of the Athlon chip in dealing
with either of these data types.
Let me be clear: The Pentium III/Camino
combination offers outstanding performance. And no
user would ever be able to notice the difference in
performance between these two PCs, although we
can measure the difference. For all practical
purposes, these two PCs offer an equivalent level of
performance.
But there's the rub. To be honest, I had expected, I
suppose, for Intel to pull a rabbit out of its hat, and to
beat the Athlon's performance soundly, especially
with its higher clock rate. Yet the Polywell beat the
Compaq by an average of 8.24%.
There are plenty of reasons to buy an Intel-powered
PC, including stability of platform, high quality and
stability of supply (though there have been reports of
shortages of the 733MHz chip). But better
performance than the AMD Athlon chip, at least
according to our tests, is not one of them.
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Regards,
Goutama |
